by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen the golden dome of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite site in Iraq, was blown up last week, enraged militias did not attack American bases but rather went after Sunni extremists who, they privately believed, were the real culprits.<\/p>\n How could that have been when clerics loudly railed to the cameras that the United States was the perpetrator?<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Hamas, despite its hatred of the U.S. and unabashed pride in its terrorist suicide bombers, suddenly seeks victim status when Washington plans to cut Palestinian financial assistance. If America is so terrible, why would Hamas want its tainted money?<\/p>\n On any given day, the state-run media of the Middle East publish vile anti-Semitism and various slanders against the West. With such an unapologetic assault on Western values, why then would thousands riot when an obscure Danish publication runs a few tasteless cartoons caricaturing Islamic radicalism? And why would Western crassness be surprising to radical Muslims anyway, given their constant harangue that we are decadent and should be shunned?<\/p>\n One answer to these paradoxes is that though scorn of the United States may be a public sport, most abroad privately value American financial support \u2014 thus acknowledging the often positive global role the United States plays.<\/p>\n The honor-bound Middle East’s leadership is obsessed with the West in general, and the United States in particular. It desperately seeks our undivided attention, and yet resents deeply that this very desire reflects either dependence or hidden admiration.<\/p>\n So Shiite clerics know that the United States freed them from Saddam Hussein, sponsored democracy and has offended most of the Sunni Middle East in supporting the Shiite right to self-representation. Yet gratitude to the infidel cannot be altogether pleasant for a once-proud but recently demoralized people.<\/p>\n Hamas leaders desperately want a U.S. secretary of state to sanction their government and give them a status they routinely deride. Likewise, Middle Eastern media outlets practice a particular behavior for themselves while insisting on quite another one for others \u2014 expecting, like troubled teenagers, to be offensive and touchy at the same time.<\/p>\n T<\/span>here are other explanations for this apparent asymmetry that transcends the usual alternating of envy and hostility toward the more powerful and influential.<\/p>\n The Middle East has grasped that its oil warps our own morality and makes us put up with such psychological puerility. Autocratic regimes that often subsidize jihadists claim they fight them in an attempt to win American attention \u2014 in the manner that odious right-wing dictatorships used to assure us that they were our friends because they were at least staunchly anti-communist.<\/p>\n But there is another rarely discussed reason that a two-faced Middle East feels it can be both savagely critical and needy of the U.S. We idealistic American people are ourselves also hypersensitive, but in a different way: We want to be liked at all costs.<\/p>\n Castigate an average American overseas for his support of democratic Israel and he will often apologize rather than cite America’s aid to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority or Egypt \u2014 much less the liberation of Kuwait, feeding of Somalia and saving of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.<\/p>\n We can see this strange psychological American need in the old conundrum over whether the United States is “hated.” Rarely do we specify “detested by whom”? The theocracy in Iran? The fundamentalist Wahhabis in the Gulf? Hamas terrorists? Sheiks who pump oil for $5 a barrel and sell it for $60?<\/p>\n Perhaps decades of well-meant multiculturalism have made us forget that all cultures, sadly, are not equal \u2014 and how rare Western liberality and tolerance are, both in the past and present.<\/p>\n To remedy such anxiety, we need not advance American exceptionalism as chauvinism. Nor do we need to gratuitously remind theocracies, dictatorships, communist states and autocracies how cruel and corrupt they are to their own.<\/p>\n But still, Americans should develop a greater confidence to accept that we are not liked abroad in large part for good reasons \u2014 having had to so often fight those who wished to destroy our liberalism, from Hitler and Mussolini to Saddam and bin Laden.<\/p>\n In the case of Iraq, America ended a murderous regime, took no oil, gave billions of dollars in aid and plans to leave as soon as a democracy can replace a dethroned dictatorship. While that apparently makes us loathed by many in the Middle East, it is nothing we should or will apologize for.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services When the golden dome of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite site in Iraq, was blown up last week, enraged militias did not attack American bases but rather went after Sunni extremists who, they privately believed, were the real culprits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[776],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-13r","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3041,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/surreal-gaza\/","url_meta":{"origin":4057,"position":0},"title":"Surreal Gaza","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The world reacts I spent today reading accounts of Gaza \u2014NY Times, AP, Reuters, etc. There are no terrorists, just militants. Not much about past rocket attacks on Israel \u2014 most everything on the crowded conditions of Gaza. Iranian aid is rarely elaborated on;\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":184,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/t-ball-war-in-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":4057,"position":1},"title":"T-Ball War in the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Classical explanations of conventional wars run something like this: An aggressor state seeks political advantage through military force. It has a hunch that the threatened target will likely either make concessions to avoid losing a war, or, if war breaks out, the resulting\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4147,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/with-hamas-victory-comes-clarity\/","url_meta":{"origin":4057,"position":2},"title":"With Hamas Victory Comes Clarity","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 6, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Unexpected. Terrible. Inevitable. Everyone has a particular take on the dramatic Palestinian election victory of Hamas. Right-wing cynics of American support for Middle East democracy say that we got our just desserts for our naive idealism. How foolish to ever believe that such\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2006"","block_context":{"text":"February 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/february-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3039,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-gaza-rules\/","url_meta":{"origin":4057,"position":3},"title":"The Gaza Rules","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The Israelis just struck back hard at Hamas in Gaza. In response, the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab world (at least publicly) expressed their anger at the killing of over 300 Palestinians, most of whom were terrorists and Hamas officials.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3585,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/upside-down-politics-in-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":4057,"position":4},"title":"Upside-down Politics in the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 16, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Jimmy Carter \u2014 a self-proclaimed champion of human rights and nonviolence \u2014 has called the U.S.'s unwillingness to accept the 2006 Palestinian election of the terrorists of Hamas \"criminal.\" But unlike Carter, Egyptian reformer Sa'd Al-Din Ibrahim \u2014 no friend of the United\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2007"","block_context":{"text":"July 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/july-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7737,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-stronger-israel\/","url_meta":{"origin":4057,"position":5},"title":"A Stronger Israel?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 5, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Elite opinion believes Israel will lose \u201clong-term\u201d whatever happens in the next weeks. Not necessarily. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online In postmodern wars, we are told, there is no victory, no defeat, no aggressors, no defenders, just a tragedy of conflicting agendas. But in such a mindless\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via NRO","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/pic_giant_080514_SM_Israel-Flag-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4058,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4057\/revisions\/4058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}