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Live Whacking Permalink Archive
click "Live Whacking" button for the latest entries


11 May 2004

Arabs

Joseph Wakim wishes to inform us we don't need to worry about Islamic extremism and terrorist attacks, because they're all fantasies invented in the racist mind of George W. Bush.

Indeed, many in the Arab world were not as shocked as George Bush at these crimes, given the history of Western Orientalism that long preceded Arab terrorism.

Joseph conveniently ignores how prisoners are treated in Arab jails (where the abuses we've seen in Abu Ghraib would make you a jailer's pet). He's more concerned with proving it's all a big Dubya lie. He knows this because of those wicked American movies:

But long before the young soldiers were psyched up by Bush, the anti-Arab predisposition was already there. A steady diet of Hollywood films invariably cast the Arab as the quintessential villain. This generation of US soldiers would have been exposed to blockbusters such as Delta Force (1986), True Lies (1995), Executive Decision (1996), The Siege (1998) and Rules of Engagement (2000). In each conquest, the American heroes reduced the terrorist Arabs to incarceration or incineration. And in each conquest, Arabs were the villains because they were uncivilised and intrinsically evil.

Right on Joseph. Those whacky American screenwriters. What kind of racist mind does it take to think that Arab terrorists would actually murder thousands of New Yorkers, hijack airplanes and attack American embassies? As Joesph says...

But these Hollywood images are born out of fantasy, not reality.

Right. None of this stuff ever happened.

Joseph makes the rather strange transition to describing the cover of a book written by Edward Said...

In his classic book Orientalism (1978), the late Arab-American Edward Said wrote: "The Orient has helped to define... the West as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience."

This contrast was epitomised by the image chosen for the book's front cover - The Snake Charmer, from French artist Jean-Leon Gerome, circa 1880. As in Gerome's The Slave Market, Arabs are depicted as naked, erotic, depraved and titillating.

This classic image has chilling and uncanny similarities to the photographs of stripped Iraqis, reduced to animals, forced to pose for their American audience in a meat festival. Perhaps this orgy of humiliation was intended to reinforce that "contrasting image" between the civilised, human West and the uncivilised, subhuman Arabs. Ironically, it has reinforced some of the Arab stereotypes of the sexually obsessed West.

Personally, I'm a little skeptical that Dubya and his Nazi stormtroopers have had their worldview shaped by a French painting from 1880.

Maybe, just maybe, the poor image of Arab culture might have something to do with an universal problem in Arab societies of vicious anti-semitism, hatred of women, corruption, honour killings, nepotism, sponsorship of terrorism, and a historical violent hostility toward non-muslim culture?

To Wakim, none of these things are important. Everything is the fault of Westerners, or Western misperceptions. Then he has to gall to close with the following...

But anyone who has studied the evolution of civilisation would understand the irony here: Western civilisation owes some of its roots to the Sumerians who lived 5000 years ago in the land we now know as Iraq. In this cradle of civilisation the first system of writing was developed, and the potter's wheel, the seed plough and many other creations we now take for granted were invented. But there is no place for these sobering facts in today's fantasy of how we imagine the Arabs to be, or should be, relative to us.

That's great Joseph. Arab culture was both great and progressive......centuries ago. Wakim cannot point to a single contribution the Arab world has given the human race in the modern age.

The Arab world has no democracies.

The Arab world produces no contributions toward science, technology or medicine.

The Arab world has not one single country where a homosexual can live openly without being killed or jailed.

The Arab world has not one single country where women have equal rights.

The Arab world sits on a sea of black gold, yet the most population live in poverty.

The Arab world allows Protocols of the elders of Zion and the vicious anti-semitic tirades of mad mullahs to be broadcast on state media.

The Arab world has universities which seem only able to produce thousands upon thousands of fundamentalist theology graduates, and still requires foreign expertise to run their oil industries.

The Arab world focuses its rage on a tiny country full of Jews which has produced a vibrant democracy with rule of law. Yet instead of trying to modernise their society to match it, the Arab world has spent generations attempting to exterminate it. Why? Because they're Jews. With none of the resources and a fraction of the population, the Israelis have produced a society no Arab country has ever come close to. Instead of seeking to improve itself, the Arab world has become consumed by its own impotence and barbarism, and openly seeks to exterminate the entire Jewish population of the Middle East, while not lifting a finger to assist their own population.

Despite all this, the Arab world plays the victim. It's all the fault of racist Americans. It's all the fault of Israel.

Not until the Arab world faces up to it's own sickness and decay will the West be willing to look on it without fear. Not until the Arab world stops teaching its children to be "martyrs", not until they form a political goal other than the extermination of Jews and westerners, not until they stop the abuse of women, not until they respect liberty and political freedom.

Not until they learn to love their own society more than they hate everyone elses.
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Arse, fuckity, goddamnit

Tight finances will prevent me from visiting Sydney this weekend for the Sydney Motorcycle Show.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. I really wanted to see the Guzzi Corsa.
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