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there is a word for chutzpah in Arabic, Amr Mussa must know it.
Mr. Mussa is the secretary general of that distinguished 22-nation
association, the Arab League, and he wants the world to know that
he is shocked — shocked — by comments made by Italian
Prime Minister Berlusconi last week. This is no small matter; as
secretary general of an organization with a membership that includes
Syria, Iraq, Libya and Sudan, Mr. Mussa cannot be somebody who it
is easy to upset.
But Mr. Berlusconi
has succeeded, apparently, where Colonel Qaddafi could not. Amr
Mussa is, now, at last offended. Like the despots who pay his wages,
the butchers' bureaucrat responds badly, it turns out, to a little
criticism. The idea of debate is as foreign to him as it is to his
masters. After days of controversy, fury and posturing, what Mussa
wanted was for us to understand that the lout Berlusconi had gone
too far. It was, said Mussa, "dangerous" and unacceptable"
for the Italian to have spoken in the way that he did. Take note
of those adjectives, "dangerous" and "unacceptable":
they have a jailhouse ring to them. They are the language of the
secret policeman, not the rhetoric of democracy.
The Italian
prime minister's crime, as we all must now know, was to talk about
the "superiority" of Western civilization, a culture that,
Mr. Berlusconi had the effrontery to claim, consists of a "value
system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries
that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion,"
respect, he argued, that was not to be found in Islamic countries.
As Jonah Goldberg
noted in Friday's
NRO, there is much to be said for this point of view and it
is striking that the opposition to it has come neither from democratic
Arab parliamentarians (strangely, there do not appear to be any)
nor from logic, nor from reasoned argument. Instead all we are offered
is the spectacle of a hireling civil servant cleverly brandishing
the one word that, in the West, is almost always guaranteed to stop
all rational debate: racism. Mr. Berlusconi's comments, were,
said Mr. Mussa, "racist." The ploy has seemed to work.
Belgium, a country that puts the less in spineless (and is the current
holder of the EU presidency) has already apologized.
But Mr. Mussa
should be careful. People in glass houses should not throw stones
(and, no, before anyone complains, that phrase is a figure of speech:
it is not a reference to the rougher edges of Sharia jurisprudence).
If he is really so worried about racism, the secretary general of
the Arab League should look first to his own membership, to the
slaver state Sudan, perhaps, or to Libya, a country where last year's
pogrom against black immigrants in the provincial town of Az Zawiyah
(50 dead, in case anyone was counting) could initially be described
in a government newspaper as no more than a "summer cloud."
If not there, perhaps Mr. Mussa would like to look instead to the
presses of Egypt and Syria, countries where little that is printed
appears without some degree of government approval, countries where
there is widespread circulation of the sort of gutter anti-Semitism
not generally seen in Europe since the days of the Third Reich.
Mr. Mussa does
not even have to leave the confines of his own bureaucracy to find
racism, or at least racism in the ludicrous way that he defines
it. If the secretary general of the Arab League genuinely believes
that Berlusconi's attempt to weigh the relative merits of Western
and Islamic cultures really represents some form of racial prejudice
he should take a look at the website
of his own organization, and check out what is written there
about the years of Islam's initial expansion.
"These
Muslim believers were not merely conquerors. They rapidly established
a new and dynamic civilization that for centuries was the only bright
light in an otherwise culturally and intellectually stagnant world."
Oops.
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