The Conspiratorial Mind of the Arab World

[mr mahs]

Pulled this off another site a definite to get an up roar out some peole here. Th author brings up some valid points good read enjoy!

--http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11483----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Conspiratorial Mind of the Arab World

By Robert Spencer

FrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2003

Have you heard? Saddam Hussein is in Tel Aviv. He has been an agent for the U.S. and Israel since 1980, and followed instructions given him by George W. Bush himself in a phone conversation last winter about how to behave when American troops entered Iraq. The capture of Saddam was an elaborate charade designed to bolster the flagging morale of American troops in Iraq. The bearded, broken man who was captured wasn’t Saddam; any keen observer would know that Saddam had a mole or wart on his cheek, but that the crude double in the hands of the Americans has no such mark. What’s more, in the footage of Saddam’s hideaway, the foliage is from late summer! Clearly the Americans are trying to fool us with months-old archival footage that has nothing to do with Saddam at all!

Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, meanwhile, are in Monte Carlo, continuing to live the high life. American troops spirited them out of the country and staged their deaths in order to demoralize the Iraqi resistance.

This kind of talk, fantastic and unbelievable as it is, is rampant in the Muslim world today. The idea that the Americans faked the capture of Saddam, and that the genuine article is still at large somewhere, is just the latest installment in a string of paranoid fantasies that have captured the imagination of untold numbers of Muslims worldwide. Most notorious, of course, is the idea that Mossad or the CIA, or both, actually flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. If Muslims were involved at all, goes the story, it was only to take the rap and justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as, coming soon to a theater of war near you, Syria and Iran).

While courageous souls such as the American Ambassador to Egypt, David Welch, have confronted these lurid fictions head-on in meetings with Muslim media figures, the stories persist — in no small part because some of these have been spread at the highest levels. Not long after 9/11, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Yasir Arafat declaimed to an appreciative audience in Ramallah: "Oh brothers, there is a conspiracy to Judaize Jerusalem." MEMRI also reports that Uday, before he took up his place at those great Monte Carlo gaming tables in the sky, wrote in an Iraqi paper in 2002 that Iran was "part of the new conspiracy against Iraq and that the Iranians were ready to cross the border at any moment to materialize their ambitions."

And of course, the mother of all conspiracy theories, that noxious incitement to genocide known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still circulates widely in the Muslim world. Nor would an inquiring mind have to go to a seedy bookstore in a shabby part of town to pick up a smudgy copy of this implausible account, cooked up by the Czar’s secret police in the 19th century, of the Zionists’ plot to rule the world. An up-to-date conspiracy theorist would need only a television: during this past Ramadan, Hizballah’s worldwide satellite TV network broadcast a thirty-part dramatization of "the criminal history of Zionism" that was quite similar to the Protocols — the genuine article was already dramatized on Egyptian television the previous year. More literary types could repair to the new Library of Alexandria, the heir to the legendary collections that shone in antiquity as beacons of civilization. There, until an international outcry forced its removal, the first Arabic translation of the Protocols was prominently displayed next to a Torah in a manuscript exhibit. According to MEMRI, a library official, Dr. Yousef Ziedan, explained that the Protocols "is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it... It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]."

Amid all this there are glimmers of self-awareness, particularly in post-Saddam Iraq. "Every time Arab peoples are afflicted with disaster, defeats, or tragedies, it is always blamed on a Zionist, colonialist, or American imperialist conspiracy." This strikingly honest assessment comes from Iraq’s Al-Ittihad daily. Unfortunately, however, it’s unlikely that conspiracy paranoia will be extinguished in the Islamic world anytime soon. After all, it has deep roots.

A fundamental element of Islamic culture is an implacable belief in its own superiority. This idea is rooted in the Qur’an and Islam: the revelation to Muhammad, according to orthodox Muslim belief, is the final and perfect revelation from the one true God. It corrects and abrogates all previous revelations, including the Torah and Gospel that form the foundation of the culture of the non-Muslim West. The Jews and Christians who remain in the world after the time of Muhammad are renegades who have rejected this final revelation out of corruption and malice. At certain points in the Middle Ages, this Muslim self-understanding meshed quite well with the realities of the world: a unified Muslim empire encroached inexorably upon a Christendom riven by squabbles and overmatched in both military might and technology.

But when all that began to change, and when the squabbling mini-states of Western Europe began to chip away at the former domains of the Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent, the Muslim world found that it had no framework to deal with defeat. The superiority of the House of Islam was a given. How then did it lie defeated, divided, colonized? Well, it must not have been a fair fight. The Muslims must have fallen victim to shabby, shadowy trickery — to a conspiracy. After all, even the Qur’an itself portrays Jews and Christians as scheming liars: "When they come to [Muhammad], they say: ‘We believe’: but in fact they enter with a mind against Faith, and they go out with the same, but Allah knoweth fully all that they hide" (Sura 5:61). Jews are even portrayed as fabricating divine revelations in their lust for money: they "write the Book with their own hands, and then say: ‘This is from Allah,’ to traffic with it for miserable price!" (Sura 2:79).

The orthodox Muslim view of verses like these (and there are many others like them) is not that they are seventh-century polemic, but words spoken by Allah himself which retain their validity for all time. Consequently all too many Muslims today see them as revelatory of the twenty-first century world. The crafty, dishonest Jewish and Christian renegades are up to their same old tricks. But even though Bush, Sharon and Co. have all the world’s resources at their disposal as they weave their conspiracies and deceptions to ensnare the Muslim world, the Muslim can see through them: he has the Qur’an.

This is the point at which all these conspiracy theories stop being merely amusing or pathetic and start to appear genuinely lethal. For what bridges of genuine trust can be built with people who view the world from this perspective? The epidemic of conspiracy stories in Middle East and Iraq in particular today betrays a mistrust that is far deeper than most anyone has imagined, and is in fact founded upon fervently held religious concepts. We may fervently hope that cooler heads will prevail, and it isn’t inconceivable that they ultimately will. But it would be wise not to expect too much in the short term.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).

[djxeno]

A fundamental element of Islamic culture is an implacable belief in its own superiority. This idea is rooted in the Qur’an and Islam: the revelation to Muhammad, according to orthodox Muslim belief, is the final and perfect revelation from the one true God. It corrects and abrogates all previous revelations, including the Torah and Gospel that form the foundation of the culture of the non-Muslim West. The Jews and Christians who remain in the world after the time of Muhammad are renegades who have rejected this final revelation out of corruption and malice. At certain points in the Middle Ages, this Muslim self-understanding meshed quite well with the realities of the world: a unified Muslim empire encroached inexorably upon a Christendom riven by squabbles and overmatched in both military might and technology.

this is complete nonsense and i can prove it you. yes, we do believe the book is the final word and came down because judaism and chritianity's teachings were corrupted by ppl.

but we also have to respect ppl of the book, meaning the jews and christiains, because even if there beliefs were flawed and corrupted, they are still practicing the faith that God brought down and they also follow the same God.

take a look at the following verse:

5.69] Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Sabians and the Christians whoever believes in Allah and the last day and does good-- they shall have no fear nor shall they grieve.

After all, even the Qur’an itself portrays Jews and Christians as scheming liars: "When they come to [Muhammad], they say: ‘We believe’: but in fact they enter with a mind against Faith, and they go out with the same, but Allah knoweth fully all that they hide" (Sura 5:61). Jews are even portrayed as fabricating divine revelations in their lust for money: they "write the Book with their own hands, and then say: ‘This is from Allah,’ to traffic with it for miserable price!" (Sura 2:79).

i dont see why this is such a big deal, at the time when the Qu'ran was revealed, this is what happened. The Jews did the same thing when Jesus was preaching.

also take a look at this verse:

[2.113] And the Jews say: The Christians do not follow anything (good) and the Christians say: The Jews do not follow anything (good) while they recite the (same) Book. Even thus say those who have no knowledge, like to what they say; so Allah shall judge between them on the day of resurrection in what they differ.

what this verse is saying is that there was suppose to be only one universal message. if judaism wasn't corrupted....jesus wouldnt have came down.....thus there wouldnt have been christainity (even tho jesus himself was trying to purify judaism and did not want to create another faith.....also he knew his teachings would be corruped and spoke of a new faith coming (islam)....he also knew that the last prophets name would be Muhammaed [pbuh] ! )

and if jesus's teachings weren't corrupted....there wouldn't be islam.

do you even know what the word "Muslim" means.....it means one who surrenders to God......thus we believe that Jesus, Moses, Noah.....alll of the prophets were Muslim.

[jamiroguy1]

I loathe the title of this thread. It's racially loaded.

[breakbeatz2]

the truth hurts jamiroquai

but nevertheless, the issues raised are valid and are prevelant in the Middle East; in evaluating the situation there and in coming up with an effective policy the issues need to be considered, no matter how unpleasant it is to hear them

it is true that a lot of the things referred to in the article are actually happening, and if you say they arent then that it a flat out lie

i'm not saying i would stereotype a religion or a people based on those facts, but when dealing with any of those countries it is important to realize what most of the pople living there re hearing and thinking

[jamiroguy1]

Originally posted by breakbeatz2

the truth hurts jamiroquai

but nevertheless, the issues raised are valid and are prevelant in the Middle East; in evaluating the situation there and in coming up with an effective policy the issues need to be considered, no matter how unpleasant it is to hear them

it is true that a lot of the things referred to in the article are actually happening, and if you say they arent then that it a flat out lie

i'm not saying i would stereotype a religion or a people based on those facts, but when dealing with any of those countries it is important to realize what most of the pople living there re hearing and thinking

Don't assume to understand the mind of all arab people. That's what this article does. It sterotypes and is very slanted. It's pretty obvious Robert Spencer is biased on the religion of Islam look at his books.