To convert shame into honor

"An Arab considers it an affront to his honor to suffer loss of face. This 'tyranny of the face' leads an Arab to do everything possible not to show his troubles to those close to him, let alone his enemies." ... "Lying and cheating in the Arab world is not really a moral matter but a method of safeguarding honor and status, avoiding shame, and at all times exploiting possibilities, for those with the wits for it, deftly and expeditiously to convert shame into honor on their own account, and vice versa for their opponents. If honor so demands, lies and cheating may become absolute imperatives." (As quoted in Honor: A History, James Bowman, 2006; page 27). 

Corporate surrogates

Modernity wants to separate the Church from the State and in Islam that separation doesn't come easy. 

The problem is the state in the Arab world has only been managed by the agents of those interested in Big Oil so the Europeanization the secular side of Middle Eastern politics has undergone was confounded by the resource curse. The undermining of and the weakening of the mainstream Mosque as a result of that Europeanization and secularization of the functions of government and the concommitant peeling away of those functions from the jurisdiction of the Mosque opened the way for the virulent, pagan strains of Islam to take hold. 

The resource curse ruined the civilizing and modernizing processes of colonialism and left largely single-ruler governments where democracy and the broad development of centrist institutions could have replaced the colonial powers. The resource curse turned what might have been merely a state-based form of colonialism into a corporate colonialism, which, it turned out, what less benign. The colonial powers abandoned there political holdings but left in their stead their corporate surrogates who maintained the influences of the resource curse and sustained the bias in favor of the strong men in the region. 

So the Middle East lost the civilizing effects of colonialism while retaining its exploitative effects. 

The second wave

In the early stage of Middle Eastern de-colonialization, European ideology took hold, most imperfectly. 

What began as democracy, socialism, freedom, and widespread development descended instead into single-man rule, political assassination, and bureaucratic corruption. 

Then the second wave of ideological development began in Europe proper, where transplanted Middle Easterners developed an autonomous identity and then brought it back to the Middle East. 

It is this second version that has morphed into Islamo-paganism. 

The UN betrays itself

The UN, which was established to create and maintain the conditions for international peace has been the single most malignant force in maintaining the Arab war against Israel. 

If the UN collapses, in the end it will be for its failure to manage the Arab war against Israel according to the principle by which is was originally established. 

In collaborating in the Arab war against Israel the UN betrayed itself. 

Striving for decency

Islamo-paganism displays a merciless quality that runs through the entire culture and has never been quite rinsed out of the Muslim and Arab world. 

That ruthlessness goes against the standards and practices of centrist institutions that strive for decency, and against the religions that serve as the centrist institutions’ foundations. 

For export only

"... "socialism," "democracy," and "revolution" had no meaningful application to Arab societies but were serving a purpose as metaphors for an absolute rule that could not be declared openly as such. Merely mystifying, these metaphors were for export only. It was abroad, in Western conferences and congresses, in learned journals and in fashionable reportage by no means always or necessarily Marxist, that Arab socialism and revolution thrived." (The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones, 2002; page 15). 

The particular reality that is ordinary life

The entire matter of Middle East politics is subject to abuse of language and power. 

The first task of the pro-Western leadership is to break the hold illusion and delusion have on the region and on the minds of those concerned with the region. This task does not redound first to the media. It is the civilized states’ political leadership that must frame the reality of that region and must represent in their public utterances the truth about what defines the fundamental values and institutions of the region. 

That truth is being hijacked by a virulent form of Islamo-paganism The West and the friends of the West must proffer an alternative reality which disqualifies that paganism. 

Israel has a special responsibility to comprehend the particular reality that is ordinary life in the Middle East. Israel must shake off its Euro-centrism and describe the fundamentalist mind-set that dominates the Middle East region. 

The Israeli left must discard the European cultural norms it is trying to superimpose on both Israeli society as well as on Muslim and Arab society, and, instead, come to understand what the region's true drivers of cultural life really are. A good place to start would be for the Israeli left to try to comprehend what is going on in Israel's fundamentalist, Orthodox community. 

Israel will not be able to resolve the global schism between Western secularism and Eastern fundamentalism until it resolves the schism between the Israeli secularists and the Israeli fundamentalists. 

Revolutionary discipline, organization, and fervor

Beware of what you ask for. The primary consequence of Muslim Westernization is the introduction into its fanatical fringe a revolutionary discipline, organization, and fervor. 

Conduct designed to undermine sanctity

Neutrality and objectivity is not the same as an unwillingness to distinguish between criminal behavior and lawful behavior, between conduct designed to protect the sanctity of human life and conduct designed to undermine that sanctity. 

News reporting that fails to preserve those distinctions is not newsworthy and not professional. It is either lazy or biased, and likely it is serving the interests of the illegitimate power-brokers on the scene. 

None are so concerned with the fragile sentiments of some interest group as the propagandistic pretensions of autocratic regimes. 

A peculiar alienation

"By now, many Arabs have been educated in the West, where they too have learned the techniques for judging themselves in an awkward and uncomfortable position of implicitly criticizing their own societies insofar as these are not yet Westernized. A peculiar alienation arises, compounded of complacency at mastering these techniques and the self-rejection they seem to imply. Not surprisingly, it becomes an escape from self-hatred to swing to Islamocentric emotions, to deny and to misrepresent Western values, to pretend that Muslims inhabit one world and Christians quite another, to lose any embarrassing comparisons of the cultures in apologetic metaphors of "imperialism." (The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones, 2002; page 19). 

Grace & vengeance

In primitive, honor societies violence is a surrogate for compromise. 

Feuds are part of the political process by which the truth and the will of God (these two are often indistinguishable from each other) is both revealed and established. If feuds result in the loss of life and limb, that is of little consequence to the concerns of the tribe or clan. Feuds also serve as the basis for the system of justice. 

With a deficit of judicial authority among the ordinary folk of village societies, the basis of adjudication is membership in a militia that can protect and exact revenge for slights and insults. This is the world of the mafioso crime families and their godfathers, the juvenile delinquent gangs or just the code of the school-yard, the drug lords, the prison gangs or the sectarian, ethnic militias that rule wherever the apparatus of state rule does not reach. 

The honor code, the maintenance of one's public face with respect and dignity, the ability to stand up for what is one's own and to meet the challenge with style and grace and with the swift exercise of power – these are all manifestations of the processes of juridical fairness in situations where the apparatus of justice is absent. 

This is what happens when grace prevails over institutions and only God's truth, and not man's institutions, operates in the affairs of men and women. Grace and vengeance are close hand-maidens, and the beatitude that comes with the sublime condition of a general enlightenment brings with it the cruelty of vengeance and the constant struggle to establish on one's own the zone of dignity that the general public sphere otherwise might or might not afford one, especially to the stranger: and at the same time the state of grace hazards the dangers and the violence of the apocalypse. 

When leadership fails, the two alternatives are grace (on the left) and vengeance (on the right), and we have both working hand in hand today in the Islamo-terrorist/Euro-leftist alliance. 

Society will defend

When a society honors someone, it declares that person as not having to defend his own dignity because society will defend it for him. 

This impulse to have the wheels of society defend the dignity of select persons is the basis of the class system. 

A system of grace and vengeance

The class system operating at the state and national level is what is being challenged by the Islamo-terrorist/Euro-leftist alliance. 

With the US as a global hyper-power and Israel as the regional hegemon, that their military superiority translates into the indulgence of dignity and the presumption of honor to these two states sticks in the craw of their respective subordinates, namely Europe for the Americans, and the Arab/Muslims for the Israelis. 

The Islamo-terrorist/Euro-leftist alliance's response is to challenge what amounts to a de facto system of justice as administered by the respective hegemons, and to offer in its stead the system of grace and vengeance that comes of a society that lacks institutional leadership. 

The path to an end to and to the eradication of the international class system runs past Armageddon. 

Peace and love and grace

The test of the Euro-leftist philosophy is xenia. 

If grace would rule, then the stranger must know his place and the stranger must be given a place. The present situation in Europe with respect to the Muslim minorities is therefore the acid test of whether those societies truly can move beyond the exigencies of the honor codes and govern domestically tranquil societies with the classlessness that comes of peace and love and grace dictating the conduct in the heart and mind of every European citizen. 

Set the time frame

In a social state where there is no leadership the objective of every actor would reasonably be to ally himself with the winner or to represent himself as the winner in the power contest that necessarily flares up in the absence of a prevailing authoritative power. 

The vying to superiority makes for a relatively short term perspective and moves the reasonable man from building and sustaining things that endure to worrying about whose side are you on. 

These are the primitive, prior, perhaps even cardinal ideologies that precede the secondary ones of leftism and rightism. 

These are the ideologies that set the time frame, whether we are living in and operating in the shorter time frame or the longer one, or, in the case of the beatific dream of grace where neither whose-side-are-you-on nor building-and-sustaining-things-that-endure is operating, the longest time frame, which is heaven on Earth. 

The caliber of leadership

The caliber of leadership that prevails in the various scenarios will vary. 

Whose-side-are-you-on societies should promote more ruthless, cruel and ambitious leaders than societies that build and sustain things that endure. The ascendancy to leadership reflects the same heirarchy of values as the administration of justice. In whose-side-are-you-on societies justice is meted out as vengeance while leadership is achieved through the death and destruction of the opposition in a free-for-all battle of raw power. 

In building-and-sustaining-things-that-endure societies justice is meted out as the administration of due process while leadership is determined by another process, the electoral process, where rules and regulations and self-restraint govern the matter. 

In the beatific-dream-of-grace societies justice is never punitive, it is always rehabilitative and focused almost enitrely on distributive justice while the leadership roles are largely administrative that do not so much exercise power as they direct traffic. 

It comes down to prudence

Whose-side-are-you-on societies exercise the least self-restraint, they most emphasize fortitude relative to justice, and they least emphasize temperance and prudence in the conduct of their political systems, delivering those virtues to the tender mercies of violent encounter and trial by fire, not a little bit of mob rule along with the ecstacy that comes of it; building-and-sustaining-things-that-endure societies exercise considerably more self-restraint, they balance fortitude and justice against each other, and they pay due respect to the virtues of temperance and prudence where the violence is tempered and the truth subject to other criteria of validity beyond superiority in contest; beatific-dream-of-grace societies exercise the most self-restraint, they least emphasize fortitude relative to justice, and they most emphasize temperance and prudence in the conduct of their political systems where courtesy prevails over aggression and the truth is entirely the product of reason and consensus, along with not a little bit of self-delusion and fantasy. 

The political systems of whose-side-are-you-on societies are simple extensions of people's social networks and they relate to their leaders the way they relate to their friends and enemies – directly and personally; for building-and-sustaining-things-that-endure societies the political system is differentiated from the social system and so the engagement in the political processes is not so intense or taken personally; in the beatific-dream-of-grace societies the social networks tend to resemble the political system and indifference and alienation are rife is a society that borders on the vacuous and the prone to illusion, fantasy and surrealism. 

The fundamental dimension along which these style of social order organize themselves is according to the relative weight they place on the carnal (hormonal) vs the abstract (neural) ways of knowing. The society organized according to whose-side-are-you-on is the most carnal, the society organized according to the beatific-dream-of-grace is the most neural, and the society organized according to building-and-sustaining-things-that-endure is a mixture of the two. 

It all comes down to prudence and how you know things. 

Fight to kill

The Arab world has a primitive mode of selecting its leaders. Contenders for leadership don't eliminate close rivals by defeating them in some contest, they kill and murder each other. 

This primitive mode of selecting domestic leadership through the ruthless, lawless, murderous exercise of raw power corresponds in their foreign relations likewise to an even greater proclivity to exercise raw, and often grotesque power. The Arabs will sieze power through any means and at any cost. When they say ‘by any means necessary,’ they are talking not only about suicide bombing and hostage taking but also about human shields, organized terror campaigns and WMDs and nuclear holocaust, the wholesale murder and mutilation of children, and anything that violates the decent sensibilities of those they denote as adversaries. 

Like an animal fighting against another species, the Arabs fight to kill; they don't fight to defeat, as an animal would with an intra-special rival. To the Arabs, everyone is an enemy. 

The pretenders to leadership cannot afford to think in terms of the general welfare. They must instead think in terms of their own persons because loss of power usually redounds to a personal death sentence. 

The entire process of allocation of power in the Arab world is lacking in dignity. No-one in Arabia can organize in a way that gives meaning to a corporate body, where the effects are on the corporation and not on the person. 

The Arabs seem not to understand and not to permit the notion of a greater identity, or if they do, the greater identity is to the family or to the religious group or some other grouping that feels beset by the outside world. Their greater identity is never to society at large, and certainly not to non-Arabs. Their’s is a greater identity that defines itself in terms of defensive rather than productive, expansive or open postures. Lacking a healthy greater identity, the Arabs create communities through the exercise of power, from externally imposed cooperation that comes from absolute rulers and despots. 

Invent a new system

As ancient Israel was situated between two great empires – Sumer (Mesopotamia/Bablyon) and Egypt – so Iraq was situated between two great religious sects – Sunni (Ottoman/Turks) and Shiite (Persia/Iran). That's why Iraq is so riven. It sits at the stormy intersection of two, irreconcilible, religious weather systems (with the Kurds, just for good measure, thrown in as a third, complicating factor). As such Iraq could either rise to the challenge and invent a new cultural/religious system, as did the Hebrews, or it could descend into chaos, as it presently seems to be doing. 

Join in common opposition

Whose side are you on is also a matter of whose side are you against. 

The alliances of hate and distrust that govern broadly all around the Arab world operate in terms of unity in common opposition rather than in affiliation. None combine with each other but various configurations of cooperation go into temporary effect when they join in common opposition to an even more despised other. 

As such the Jews offer a target that is almost irresistible.