Further notes on Middle East madness

In my post on Middle East deep background, I mentioned Pryce-Jones' The Closed Circle as a critical and unique book in explaining to outsiders how the Middle East works. If you've read it, nothing in the Middle East will surprise you -- the incomprehensible becomes frighteningly understandable. Nasrallah and Hizbollah are the latest example of power-challenging, honor-shame, violent careerism based on sponsored proxyship, and the "closed circle" of destructive and self-destructive playacting.

I might have made it sound as if Middle Easterners themselves don't understand this retarded folly. Fortunately, there are some; unfortunately, they're rarely in the driver's seat. Check out IraqPundit's denunciation of Nasrallah here.

Although there are reprehensible individuals and organizations of this type all over the Middle East, I'm far from blaming individual Arabs on the street for this nightmare. It's the result of centuries of decay, once held in check by Ottoman rule and the Arabs' backwardness, now puffed up by oil revenue and modern technology. If there is a way, current elites or new ones will lead the Arabs out of it. It won't happen as the result of democracy, which seems everywhere in the Islamic world to be leading towards "shari'a by the will of the people."

LATER: In case you think the Arab-Israel national conflict hasn't been fully converted by the jihadis into a Muslim-Jewish religious conflict, see here and here.

It will take, oh, say a few years, for the Western "news" media to catch on to this. Its main role in our society is rehashing ideology, the manufacture and baby-sitting of conventional wisdom, clichés, and half-truths.

EVEN LATER: Wrote too soon, sort of. The IHT has a disturbing story on the decline of secularism in Malaysia, which is barely-majority Muslim, as picked up by DhimmiWatch.