Our Friends in the Middle East

While war rages in Iraq and Lebanon and Islamic fundamentalist control returns to the narco-warlord riven zona libre that is Afghanistan, it sometimes seems that all of the other Islamic nations of the region are on the sidelines cheering on the home team and threatening to spill onto the field and join the fray. It's not true, we still have many "friends" in the Arab world. Friends who remain above the fray. Let us for a moment cast a comforting gaze upon them.

First we travel to the south, along the coast of the Arabian Sea, home of those countries known as the "Gulf States". Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, land of the bedouins. No Sunni/Shiia conflict here. These are the Wahabi Arabs, played so picaresquely by Alec, Anthony and Omar in everybody's favorite 1963 movie epic. They are to the Sunnis and Shiites as snake handling, tongue talking holyrollers are to Lutherans and Methodists. Public beheadings and mutilations are not done here for the benefit of CNN news crews, but routinely for violation of Sharia Law. There is no problem with separation of religious and civil authorities here, they are one and the same. Slavery is legal. Women are rarely allowed out of the house. We are assured they are moving toward democracy, just very, very slowly. These are the lands where most of the 9/11 perpetrators hail from and this is where the money comes from. We can fool ourselves into believing that the money to fund Jihad comes from Iran, Iraq or someplace else but that would be a fantasy. All the money comes from the Gulf states. They are truly the engine of Islam. This function is too important to compromise with violent conflict, "The oil must flow, Maud-Dhib". George W loves these guys, he wishes he was one.

Next we move to the mighty Nile and Egypt, cradle of civilization, a populous but poor nation, gripped by an austere socialist military dictatorship. Coptic Christians here are forced to live as virtual untouchables in an underground society, barred from public education or formal employment. The slave trade also flourishes. Genital mutilation of young girls among the devout is the rule. American financial aid and frequent annihilation of their military by the Israelis keep them quiet. Hatred for the West seethes just below the surface at every level of society.

Finally let us look at Turkey, that most Westernized of Islamic countries. They have lately been calling themselves "Europeans", claiming that ethnic and religious discrimination keep them from taking their place in the EU. America considers them one of it's staunchest allies. For many decades they have sent their sons and daughters to the west, to do the jobs "Europeans won't do", then refusing to go home when their contracts expire, sound familiar? Their host countries are too polite to force them out and it would be bad PR. It is interesting to note that the Turkish minorities are responsible for virtually all of the violent crime in Germany and Scandinavia, including the huge increase in rape, in the countries of Sweden and Norway, where it was almost a non-existent crime a decade ago. Turkey also continues to hold the northern half of the Island of Cyprus, which it took from Greece in order to "protect" the ethnic Turks in 1971. Conditions are so bad there that the ethnic Turks long ago voted to return to Greek control. The Greeks, wisely, refuse to take them back. Turkey continues to deny that the Armenian genocide, where essentially every one of the millions of Turkish Armenians were driven, with only the shirts on their backs, into the burning wastes of the Syrian desert and died of thirst, even happened. All traces of Armenian culture in Turkey have been carefully expunged. When pressed Turkish spokesmen state simply, "they all moved away".

These are the "good' Arab countries. The ones that remain on "our" side. Pretty inspiring.