Monday, May 04, 2009

A Discourse of Conspiracy

Last Friday I posted about the Saudi intellectual who defended the importance of Western civilization.

Now we hear from an Algerian author who is willing to speak the truth about the decline and degradation of Arab culture. MEMRI has a subtitled video of an interview with Anwar Malek; below are some excerpts from the transcript:

Algerian Author Anwar Malek: The Arabs Have Lost Their Worth, Their Humanity, and Their Culture

Following are excerpts from an interview with Algerian author Anwar Malek, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on March 3, 2009:

Interviewer: 73% of our viewers believe that the Arabs constitute a great power, and have ability to be influential, and so on.
 
  […]
 
Anwar Malek: This figure indicates that the Arabs are afflicted with fantasies and obsolete bravado.
 
Interviewer: False bravado.
 
Anwar Malek: False, empty bravado, which does no good to anybody. The Arabs invented, or discovered, the zero — but what did they do with it? Some of them sat on it, some put it on their heads, while others wore it around their waists, and began shaking their hips, their bellies, and their breasts, in order to sell to the world the idea that modern Arabs are doing something. Today, the Arabs constitute nothing but thousands of zeros to the left… The Arabs have lost their worth, their humanity, their culture, and everything. There is nothing to suggest that the Arabs can be relied upon to produce anything.
- - - - - - - - -
  This false bravado is deeply rooted in the Arabs to an unimaginable degree. It is so deeply rooted that the Arabs believe they can go to the moon. If you asked your viewers whether the Arabs would be able to reach the moon by 2015, they would say: “Yes, the Arabs will get to the moon.” By Allah, the Arabs will not go more than a few hundred kilometers from their doorsteps. These are empty words.
 
In all honesty, the Arabs are backward, and are not fit for civilization at all. I am not referring to history. I am talking about the Arabs of today. I’m not talking about the Arabs of the past, in the days of the Islamic conquests. I am talking about the Arabs of today. They have lost their Arab identity, and have begun to export shawarma, falafel, and lupin beans to Europe, and they purport to be bringing something Arab to Europe.
 
   […]
 
Interviewer: Look what small resistance movements have achieved, by means of very primitive weapons, in confronting aggressors and enemies. Can you deny this? This completely refutes what you say.
 
Anwar Malek: What resistance are you talking about? If you are talking about the resistance of Hizbullah — Hizbullah has destroyed Lebanon, in the framework of a Persian conspiracy. I say this point blank. As for the resistance in Palestine — they are defending themselves. They are a group of people defending themselves from attacks from all directions. What did they achieve? Did they defeat or destroy Israel? I consider it a miracle when someone manages to even defend himself. The reality of the Arabs is one of defeat, hitting rock bottom… We are defeated, politically and militarily… and economically, socially, and even psychologically. We have a discourse of conspiracy, and we blame everything on others.

Visit MEMRI to watch the complete video.


Hat tip: AA.

12 comments:

Profitsbeard said...

Sounds like a coach, at half-time, trying to rouse the team with calculated humiliation.

Not a serious assessment.

Just shaming them to work harder to subjugate the infidels.

Not giving a call for "Arabs" to do anything creative, constructive, useful, decent, tolerant or wortwhile in any human sense.

Islam prevents it.

Holger said...

Well, I think it was an honest assessment that he put forth. Not all, 1,5 billion, can be in complete denial.
To dismiss anything productive that a person says, just because he happens to be muslim, is not doing anyone a favor. So let's give some cred to the guy!

laine said...

This is exactly the kind of thing that the West should be working at disseminating widely including on the front pages of its newspapers. The usual racist claptrap doesn't work to void it because it comes from an Arab Muslim.

Let all the multiculturalist fetishists come up with any positive way that Arabs of the past century into this one have contributed to humankind.

They won't be able to come up with anything but falafel LOL.

Most importantly, western libs need to be smacked over the head with the particulars of Arab culture, the grandiosity and the blaming everything on everyone else but themselves.

It's weird how the biggest pushers of multiculturalism remain butt ignorant about the cultures they are promoting over their own. They must get their ideas from Disneyland's "It's a Small World After All".

Anonymous said...

There was some truth there, but they wouldn't dare utter the higher truth (that Islam is responsible for said degradation), nor would they dare suggest that jihad must stop.

Marian - CZ said...

This guy has impossibly large, brass-and-steel balls.

Three salutes to him. The courage to state the obvious in face of collective aggressive denial is HUGE. Even Geert Wilders, the European icon of political incorrectness, does not dare to speak like that.

Profitsbeard: The guy ran away from Algeria Islamist civil war and is positively mentioned at Ali Sina's faithfreedom site. I think that trusting his sincerity is reasonable at this point. We must not fall into Arab-like conspiracy mindset; our civilization's greatest asset is rationality.

Czechmade said...

Poor guy, not even the celebrated zero is their invention - it is Hindu.

There is even a better assessment on memri.org by a Syrian poet Adonis - claiming that the Arab language and literature is dead.

It is much more sophisticated. Also the Arab language is discussed on other webs by native speakers. It would be wonderful to collect all this material, if you came across it. It indicates WHY it is so difficult to translate into standard Arabic.

Urdu, Persian, Turkish do not have this basic problem! They have successfully adopted all the modern stuff. But Arabic is different - it is even difficult for management of a company.

Adonis lives in Paris. You can also enjoy sort of Europeanness in his face. Even our faces are cultural show windows...

Most languages were forced to make compromises with other languages absorbing vocabulary, imitating foreign words or implanting various new semantics in their old stuff.

The Jews and the Christians! Used to translate for centuries for themselves or others. How lucky we are - not having a central holy language!

Baron, try to bring Adonis to GoV.

mace said...

Actually the Arabs didn't invent zero, the positional number system which requires the concept of zero was invented in India sometime in the first millennium and carried to Europe by Moslem traders. The medieval Europeans mistakenly gave the credit of the invention to the Arabs, that's the reason we incorrectly call our numerical system "Arabic." Another system using zero was invented, probably by the Maya about the same period in Mesoamerica, no Arabs were invoved there either.

mace said...

Czechmade,

Didn't notice your post re zero,won't hurt to say it twice!

You'd think the Arabs would ask themselves why they are one of the few civilisations not progressing. The East Asians learned from the West and now beat us at our own game,the Arabs are still in their 1000 year torpor, the cause must be their religion.

Czechmade said...

Yes, zero - shoonya - emptiness.

A deep river flowing calmly through the Hindu/Buddhist mental landscape.

With many many implications. The Indian spirit/nature is not at all scared of "vacuum". True Great Kenophiles!!! Final bliss or love as appendix or addendum comes naturally.
A proof for something?

xlbrl said...

Wrong headline.
27% of Arabs are not imbicles, approximating the condition of the West. Very impressive, really.

ɱØяñιηg$ʇðя ©™ said...

The myth of the arabs inventing math and algebra is very much alive today. I've seen it on local forums where muslims has truly embraced it. Even when shown the truth, they can't accept it. It's probably easier to shut their eyes than realizing that they basically hasn't contributed to anything at all important in the last few hundred years or so. Except for falafel, that is... LOL

Hesperado said...

Marian CZ writes above:

Profitsbeard: The guy ran away from Algeria Islamist civil war and is positively mentioned at Ali Sina's faithfreedom site. I think that trusting his sincerity is reasonable at this point. We must not fall into Arab-like conspiracy mindset; our civilization's greatest asset is rationality.Before we examine a crucial statement by Anwar Malek, let's examine the logic of Marian CZ's defense of him:

1) "The guy ran away from Algeria Islamist civil war"

This is not sufficient evidence of his reliability as an ally of ours. The Muslim world from the Philippines to Morocco and throughout the West shows a mountain of evidence of various degrees and forms of fanatically pathological internal bickerings, mutual recriminations, and internecine violence. Throughout history, Muslims have been fighting each other. Just because one Muslim happens to be caught in crossfire and has to run away from other Muslims, then, is fairly worthless data for the purpose of determining a truly anti-Islamic stance. All it indicates is that Anwar Malek was having a normal bad day with his Islamic brothers.

2) "and is positively mentioned at Ali Sina's faithfreedom site"

I just did an advanced search on Google, specifying the website "http://www.faithfreedom.org/", searching for "anwar malek" and even tried the alternate spelling of "anwar malik". I found nothing. (Even if one finds a "positive mention" of Anwar Malek on the faithfreedom site, it doesn't mean it has official blessing there; and even if one could possibly prove official faithfreedom blessing of Anwar Malek, that doesn't necessarily mean that approval is warranted. It has to be cogently argued before our assent to it is reasonable.)

3) "I think that trusting his sincerity is reasonable at this point".

This tentative conclusion seems derived from points #1 and #2, which I demonstrated are insufficient.

4) "We must not fall into Arab-like conspiracy mindset"

No disagreement there.

5) "our civilization's greatest asset is rationality."

It certainly is; and it would be irrational to ignore mountains of evidence that indicate the insincerity and/or unreliability of Anwar Malek, evidence concerning

1) as mentioned above, the fanatically pathological propensity for internecine strife and mutual hatred among Muslims whereby Kurds hate Arabs, Arabs hate Berbers, black African Sudanese Muslims hate other black African Muslims with less Arabic blood, Arabs disdain as inferior Muslims from their East (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.), and then we have the bewildering jungle of Islamic splinter groups who spend half their time (when they are not nursing hatred against the non-Muslim Other) accusing each other of taqfir or of not being sufficiently punctiliously correct about the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder of being a "true Muslim";

and

2) the sociocultural and religious propensity for taqiyya among Muslims with regard to their perennial preoccupation with defending Islam and defeating "enemies" of Islam.

3) Add to this the conspicuous absence of any criticism of Islam itself in Anwar Malek's interview. He may even be a Berber (or part Berber) who has sociocultural psychological resentments against the Arabs, but cannot see the larger picture that he shares the same disease (Islam) that stunts and disfigures the Arabs.

4) Then we have his words from this interview, where he says:

"the Arabs are backward, and are not fit for civilization at all. I am not referring to history. I am talking about the Arabs of today. I’m not talking about the Arabs of the past, in the days of the Islamic conquests."

Clearly implied here is a defense if not a glorification of "the Islamic conquests" of the golden age of yesteryear, when Muslims were fit for "civilization" -- precisely by virtue of the power they had as manifested by subjugating so many peoples and so many lands. It would be more rational for us to conclude that Anwar Malek is an Islamic supremacist whose present gripes against "Arabs" are not useful for our purposes, but are rather positively supporting what motivates Islamic terrorists around the world -- namely, the revival of the glory days of Islamic "civilization". Malek's gripes against the Arabs in fact seem based on his disappointment in their ability to revive and recover the former greatness of Muslims, when Muslims were able to go around conquering other people and subjugating them under the supremacy of Islamic law, and to kill those who resisted.