{"id":8734,"date":"2015-10-21T04:33:06","date_gmt":"2015-10-21T11:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8734"},"modified":"2015-10-19T14:44:51","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T21:44:51","slug":"the-middle-east-and-orwellian-historical-arguments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-middle-east-and-orwellian-historical-arguments\/","title":{"rendered":"The Middle East and Orwellian Historical Arguments"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

When lies are the foundation of policies.<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via www.breitbart.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many of our policy debates and conflicts both domestic and foreign call on history to validate their positions. At home, crimes from the past like slavery and legal segregation are used to justify present policies ranging from racial set asides to housing regulations long after those institutions have been dismantled. Abroad, our jihadist enemies continually evoke the Crusades, \u201ccolonialism,\u201d and \u201cimperialism\u201d as justifications for their violence. Yet the \u201chistory\u201d used in such fashion is usually one-sided, simplistic, or downright false. Nor is the reason hard to find: as we read in 1984<\/em>, \u201cWho controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.\u201d Bad history is a powerful instrument for gaining political power.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Nowhere is the abuse of history more rampant than in the Middle East. Since World War II all the problems whose origins lie in dysfunctional tribal and religious beliefs and behaviors have been laid at the feet of \u201ccolonialism\u201d and \u201cimperialism.\u201d Western leftists\u2013\u2013besotted both by a marxiste<\/em> hatred of liberal democracy, and by juvenile noble-savage Third-Worldism\u2013\u2013 have legitimized this specious pretext, which now for many has become historical fact.<\/p>\n

In reality, Europeans never had colonies in the modern Middle East, for the simple reason that the territory was controlled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Hence \u201ccolonialism\u201d is irrelevant for that region\u2019s history. The facts of that history teach us that the feckless incompetence of a series of Ottoman sultans, in pursuit of imperialist dreams of recovering their lost Balkan provinces and restoring their hegemony over Egypt, had financially weakened the empire and made it dependent on the European powers who lent them the money. As a result, it became the geopolitical \u201csick man\u201d that England had to protect against Russian adventurism and Egyptian expansionism.<\/p>\n

Historians Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh succinctly state the conclusion of a sober examination of these facts:<\/p>\n

Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing<\/em>indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate. Great-power influences, however potent, have played a secondary role, constituting neither the primary force behind the region\u2019s political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility. Even at the weakest point in their modern history, during the First World War and in its immediate wake, Middle Eastern actors were not hapless victims of predatory imperial powers but active participants in the restructuring of their region.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the Ottoman decision to join the Central Powers in World War I in order to regain imperial status and recover lost territory, to the Hashemite clan\u2019s inveigling England into giving them most of the Ottoman territories after the war, the prime movers in creating the modern Middle East were the Ottomans, Egyptians, and Arabs, not the \u201ccolonial\u201d powers who, as great powers have done since ancient Sumer, attempted to influence events in order to advance their own interests. But that\u2019s not \u201cimperialism\u201d properly understood.<\/p>\n

The most egregious example of this Orwellian history, however, is the predicating of Muslim violence against Israel on its status as a neo-imperialist Western stooge violently thrust into the \u201chomeland\u201d of the \u201cPalestinian\u201d people whose ancient lands were stolen by an \u201cillegitimate\u201d nation that continues brutally to \u201coccupy\u201d the territory rightfully belonging to the \u201cPalestinians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everything about this narrative is false. There is no such thing as a \u201cPalestinian\u201d people, an idea that arose only after the Six Day War of 1967. The bulk of the people mistakenly called \u201cPalestinians\u201d are ethnically, religiously, and linguistically indistinguishable from Arab Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria. Numerous comments by Arab leaders before 1967 emphasized this fact. For example, Zouhair Muhsin, a member of the Executive Council of the PLO, said, \u201cThere are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity\u2026 Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Second, the region in question was never an Arab homeland, and Arabs only began to inhabit it permanently after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 637. Since then Muslim Arabs have come as conquerors, occupiers, migrant laborers, and immigrants, but they are no more \u201cindigenous\u201d peoples than Americans are of North America. On the other hand, abundant literary and archaeological evidence confirms the presence of Jews in the area and the status of Jerusalem as a Jewish city since 1300 B.C. This fact explains the Orwellian rewrite of history the Palestinian Arabs are currently engaged in, most despicably by destroying the archeological evidence on the Temple Mount that confirms the Jews\u2019 presence on that site almost 2000 years before Islam even existed.<\/p>\n

Third, the claim that Israel is an \u201cillegitimate\u201d state is false. Israel was created as part of the mandatory system put into place after World War I as part of the peace settlement, and confirmed by several international treaties, the League of Nations, and later U.N. Resolution 181. Except for the U.N. resolution, that same process created the new nations of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. If Israel is illegitimate, why aren\u2019t those other nations? Could it be because for traditional Muslims, it is Jews<\/em> who are illegitimate, not their state? Could that explain why over a million Arabs live in Israel, but any future Palestinian state must be Judenrein<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Finally, the charge of an \u201cillegal occupation\u201d of the \u201coccupied West Bank\u201d is a canard. Those territories, comprising the heartland of the ancient Jewish nations of Judea and Samaria, are disputed<\/em>, their final disposition awaiting a peace treaty. There are no \u201cborders\u201d thought to define the mythical Palestinian nation. Those lines on the map are armistice lines, created after Israel defeated the armies of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in 1967. By all rights as the victor, Israel could have incorporated the so-called West Bank into the state of Israel, on the same eternal wages of war that led to the American Southwest being incorporated into the U.S. after the 1846-48 war with Mexico, or of Prussian Germany into Poland after World War II. Indeed, since the territory in question was for thousands of years the homeland of the Jewish people, Israel would have had abetter<\/em> case for restoring Judea and Samaria to Israel. Instead, in the Orwellian history created by Muslims and accepted by the West, the indigenous peoples are considered the \u201coccupiers\u201d of their own lands, and conquerors, invaders, and colonizers considered the disenfranchised victims.<\/p>\n

The recent suicide-murders of random Israelis by Palestinians have been analyzed in terms that perpetuate this false history. Our intellectually challenged Secretary of State, John Kerry, referred to this false history when he said at Harvard, \u201cThere\u2019s been a massive increase in settlement over the course of the last years and there\u2019s anincrease in the violence<\/a> because there\u2019s this frustration that\u2019s growing,\u201d he said. \u201cSettlements\u201d is nothing more than a mindless mantra, like \u201ccycle of violence\u201d or \u201ccheckpoints\u201d or the \u201csanctity of the al-Aqsa mosque,\u201d for the pusillanimous West, while for Muslims they are the pretexts for practicing their traditional Jew-hatred and sacralized violence.<\/p>\n

The history this reporting on the Temple Mount ignores is the great forbearance, and to be sure tactical pragmatism, of the Israelis in leaving the Temple Mount under the management of the Arabs; while a mosque created as a triumphalist boast over conquered Christians and Jews, in a city never mentioned in the Koran, is respected more by the West than its own empty cathedrals. Meanwhile the travails of Muslim immigrants are hyped and agonized over more than the crucifixions, torture, rape, and murder of Christians in the greatest mass persecution of Christians in history.<\/p>\n

These are the wages of historical ignorance and the acceptance of a history made up by an adversary who can \u201cthrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened,\u201d as Orwell says of the Party in1984<\/em>. Our foreign policy has often been predicated on these lies, and the outcome has been predictable when lies are the foundation of policies\u2013\u2013the abject failure we are witnessing in the region today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When lies are the foundation of policies. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Many of our policy debates and conflicts both domestic and foreign call on history to validate their positions. At home, crimes from the past like slavery and legal segregation are used to justify present policies ranging from racial set asides to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[97,225,59,842,22,262],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2gS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":8734,"position":0},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2043,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-other-california\/","url_meta":{"origin":8734,"position":1},"title":"The Other California","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York after spending the summer bumming around Italy and Greece, the customs agent looked at my passport and said with a Bronx sneer, \u201cBruce Thornton, huh? Is that one of them Hollywood names?\u201d Hearing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2969,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/unwarranted-self-abasement\/","url_meta":{"origin":8734,"position":2},"title":"Unwarranted Self-Abasement","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com George Bush\u2019s vigorous defense of our national security and vocal pride in our values and goodness went a long way to getting rid of the \u201ckick me\u201d sign liberal America has hung on our collective back. You know, that reflex of guilt and shame about\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3052,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/corrupt-language-breeds-bad-history-and-bad-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":8734,"position":3},"title":"Corrupt Language Breeds Bad History and Bad Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 24, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As the history of communism and fascism both illustrate, modern political tyranny has relied on fabricated history to legitimize its claims and actions, and such history in turn relies on the debasement of language. Nowhere is this axiom more evident than in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":868,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/appeasement-bode-war-not-peace\/","url_meta":{"origin":8734,"position":4},"title":"Appeasement Bode War Not Peace","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 3, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review A review of\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America\u00a0by Bruce S. Thornton. (Encounter Books, 2011 pp. 283) Winston Churchill famously said, \"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.\" In\u00a0The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1232,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/policies-based-on-illusion\/","url_meta":{"origin":8734,"position":5},"title":"Policies Based on Illusion","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 28, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal The great historian of Soviet Russia, Robert Conquest, once wrote something about the dangers of na\u00efve diplomacy that I\u2019m reminded of daily. \u201cWe are still faced with the absolutely crucial problem of making the intellectual and imaginative effort\u00a0not\u00a0to project our ideas of common sense\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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