WESTERN CYNICISM
Reader comment on item: Palestinians Taste a Dose of Their Own Medicine

Submitted by Rakshas 10 Anan (India), Nov 22, 2005 at 02:49

Dr. Daniel Pipes, thank you for sharing with us the results of your extensive research to help us develop an intelligent perspective on vexing issues that threaten our collective survival in the face of Islamic Jihad. We have probably reached the point of no return, despite news speculating about the death of Zarqawi in Mosul, N. Iraq, which, if true, is the result of tribal revenge for the Amman blasts. The intense on-going debates on your articles do much to highlight unknown facets of the subjects from so many different angles.

I am surprised that you have not factored in vested interests of the Western defence industry in keeping the pot on boil around the world, and especially in the Middle East. Obviously, it is not only about Oil. The Economy of War in modern times must make an appearance on the Daniel Pipes' Weblog at some stage. To speak of PEACE is premature in the face of naked terrorist aggression and its shadow side, the weapons industry along with its spawn, the vast weapons blackmarket in the post-Cold War scenario. It was fine, it seems, to have Jews and Arabs blow each others' heads off, so long as there was a killing to be made from the hostilities, providing employment on a vast scale back home. This also explains why the Arabs were the blue eyed boys with all their petrodollars keeping the Western Defence machinery well-oiled.

That Islam was thoroughly familiar with the gains of Jihad, flourishing through barbaric aggression on peaceful societies to appropriate the fruits of their creativity, technologies and prosperity is well-known. Thus uneducated bloodthirsty killers, thieves and lechers on camels and horseback, belonging to desert tribes living in tents with zero development, also with opium-addled brains, could set themselves up in Islamist chronicles as patrons of Arts, Sciences (including astronomy, mathematics and medicine) and Architecture.

The history of Islam is largely a testament of untimely deaths through excess in abuse and violence, as father killed son or son killed father and brother killed brother for the bigger stake in all the loot and self aggrandisement. Yet we have passed without proper assessment Islamic claims to high culture in medieval times. The burners of libraries and temples -- repositories of art and culture -- went to great lengths to generate chronicles to the glory of their conquests. That Victorian scholars could lend credence to their claims, is a great travesty of modern scholarly enterprise. Following the elementary principles set out in Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions would be sufficient to give the BIG LIE to these claims. But Western scholars have put their weight behind many such spurious associations to distort the history of human civilisation. No doubt this is proof of the adage that 'he who pays the piper calls the tune'; and the Arab chieftains must have paid in gold looted from their hapless victims!

Returning to the main point, European nations and the US have cynically preached peace prescriptions to Israel, the greatest victim of three decades of violent terrorism -- the sole legacy of the Arabs to the long-suffering world. It was all so fine until terrorism began to upset the puppet players in their own homelands! The drug and crime cartels, the international Mafia, the little dictators and their genocides here and there, the tides of asylum seekers, were all playthings of the rich and powerful in the West. They hardly understood how things began to get out-of-hand. Playing with the dynamite of Pan-Islamism on distant shores was at last the key to releasing the jihadi devil, suppressed to some extent since the time of the Crusades.

Dr. Pipes has mentioned elsewhere the conundrum of Prince Charles' backing Islam. But the British high society has 'flirted' with Arabs of dubious reputation for a long time now, not to have 'submitted' to possibilities of being seriously compromised. The list includes the likes of black market arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi (uncle of Dody Al Fayed) and fronts in London of the Pakistani ISI.

Afghanistan in the end proved to be the final straw in unsuspected ways for all the Cold War strategists, east and west -- to mix many metaphors -- the forest fire that blazed out of control and now threatens homelands in the West. The prolferating missiles, rocket launchers, suitcase nukes and wmds that were to promise a chicken in every pot for countries like Sweden, Russia, France, UK and the US, are now unerringly aimed at those who armed the terrorislamists in the first place, with Israel and India serving as major shock absorbers for the rest of the world! In these two countries, there is stamina and toughness that comes from long term development of immunity. That is not the case with self-righteous Europe and America. Right now, we are enjoying PEACE in the eye of the storm; for how long, who knows?

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