Gulf News, Western fear of Arabs and Muslims has emerged as one of the most striking political and psychological phenomena of recent years. Fear is perhaps too mild a word for it. The emotion that has seized the western world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is more like paranoia.
A whole intellectual industry has sprung up in the west, seeking to dissect and understand the “violence”, “hate” and “fanaticism” which the Arab and Muslim world is said to direct against the west.
What is the root of this “Arab rage”? Almost invariably, western commentators have concluded that the essential cause lies in the “failed” societies of the Arab world, in their absence of democracy, their abuse of human rights, their economic mismanagement, their oppression of women, their exploding populations, their soaring unemployment, their poor education, their technological backwardness, even their lack of Internet access!
In Davos this year, the consensus among business and political leaders attending the World Economic Forum was that poverty and economic backwardness were among the main reasons why Arabs and Muslims embraced Islamic fundamentalism, and, in some cases, resorted to terrorism.
Last Monday, Thomas Freidman of The New York Times claimed to know the essential cause of terrorist violence: it was the lack of jobs. He put the blame on Europe which he described as “the real factory of Arab-Muslim rage”. On the same day, in an article in Britain's Financial Times, Sir Lawrence Friedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, wrote that the Arab world was suffering from the collapse of Gamal Abdel-Nasser's pan-Arabism and from disastrous economic policies. His gloomy conclusion was that the “real alternatives” for the Middle East were “chaos or autocracy”.
Exporting the problem to the Arabs
In my view, this type of analysis is neither accurate nor disinterested. It represents an attempt to export to the Arab and Muslim world the west's share of responsibility for the present unstable state of affairs.
Soon after 9/11, several commentators, especially in the US, began to argue that the terrorist attacks were not in any way a response to American policies in the Middle East
