Political Imbecility In The Arab World

...Egypt, the country that forged a brilliant path to peace with Israel 31 years ago, is becoming something worse than an anti-Semitic cesspool. It is turning itself into a nation of political imbeciles.

Thus writes Bret Stephens about the recent deranged response in Egypt to both shark attacks and the attacks on Copts, accusing Israel of being behind both.

According to Stephens, it's not that the Egyptian leadership shares in their people's paranoia--after all, Israel is an important ally against their common enemies: Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. And besides, US aid depends on maintaining some semblance of a peace with Israel. But even if they do not believe in the conspiracy theories, Egypt's leaders are trapped by them: on the one hand relying on the hate to keep the people happy and unified, and on the other needing the Israeli alliance

But then there is the matter of the backwardness of the Egyptian people themselves:

As for Egyptians themselves, it means the world they inhabit, intellectually speaking, has become almost medieval in its outlook and therefore in its possibilities. Why do the Arab states lag so far behind the rest of the world, including Muslim states such as Indonesia, when it comes to most measures of social, economic and political development? Several comprehensive studies, including the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, have offered a variety of explanations, ranging from demographic pressures to the absence of representative government.

But the ultimate source of Arab backwardness, unmentioned by most of these studies, lies in the debasement of the Arab mind. When the only diagnosis Egyptians can offer for their various predicaments—ranging from sectarian terrorism to a recent spate of freak shark attacks at a Sinai beach resort—is that it's all a Zionist plot, you know that the country is in very deep trouble.

Stephens suggests that Egyptians are in need of a good liberal education, including an "Arabic translation of the complete works of John Locke, starting with his 'Letter Concerning Toleration.'"

Maybe so, but before even that, maybe what Egypt--and similarly backward Arab countries--need is for the West to stop turning a blind eye to the vicious antisemitism and demonization of Israel as if this was normal and acceptable behavior in the 21st century.

Technorati Tag: Egypt.