Bret Stephens delivers a stinging indictment of Arab backwardness in light of the 'blame the Jews' game being played in the aftermath of the Alexandria car bombing.
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.
Is there a way out? George W. Bush thought he had an answer with the freedom agenda, and Barack Obama thinks he has one in what might be called the respect agenda. But freedom and respect for what? Egyptians will enjoy neither until they develop and adopt a set of political ideas that rests on something more than obscurantism, conspiracy and a zero-sum struggle for power.
In a word, Egyptians need liberalism (of the old-fashioned kind), which begins not with a vote but with an education. Distributing an Arabic translation of the complete works of John Locke, starting with his "Letter Concerning Toleration," would be a good place to begin undoing the damage so cruelly done in Alexandria.
The backwardness cannot be reversed overnight, but if it is to be reversed someone has to start somewhere. So far, there is no indication that anyone has started at all. Instead, the world pretends that the behavior of Egypt and other Arab countries is 'normal' to avoid being seen as 'racist' or offensive.
Read the whole thing in Part2
Carl in Jerusalem
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