"Thinking Like an Arab"

"Thinking Like an Arab"

Editor Note: This a good read and echoes what many of us have been saying for years. I highly recommend reading the entire article.

Thinking Like an Arab Written by Alan Caruba Monday, March 06, 2006 If it hasn’t occurred to most Americans by now, Arabs don’t think like us. They see the world in very different terms. Rationality, logic, and common sense do not rate high among their priorities. Not long ago, I had the opportunity to work briefly with Edward V. Badolato, a retired U.S. Marine colonel with a distinguished career in government and private enterprise. Col. Badolato is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College with several tours of duty in the Middle East, beginning in 1967 shortly after the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. His tours took him to nearly every country in the Middle East. Following his retirement, he served as a deputy assistant secretary of energy in both the Reagan and Bush administrations (1984-89). As such, he was the principal architect of the government’s readiness and response to terrorist threats to our energy infrastructure. In 1980, he wrote a white paper, “Learning to Think Like an Arab Muslim: a Short Guide to Understanding the Arab Mentality.” I am going to provide a brief introduction to it. At only 14 pages, it is not a long document, but it succinctly explains why Americans and others in the West are encountering such difficulty understanding why Arab Muslims appear, by our standards, to be completely insane. Why, for example, would people who believe that they have the one, true religion, not hesitate to blow up mosques and other holy places? Why would they attack weddings and funerals? Why is beheading so popular among terrorists? Why would a few cartoons set off rioting and killing? And what does all this mean to us in terms of the threat it represents? Badolato begins by describing Arabs as “a proud and sensitive people whose culture is mainly derived from three key factors: family, language, and religion.” The Arab cultural system has existed for centuries and predates the introduction of Islam around 610 AD and its rapid spread after the death of Muhammad in 632 AD. “An Arab’s commonly accepted view of the world (is) basically threatening and harsh.” Arab Muslims and presumably others because Islam has more than a billion adherents, divide the world between themselves and what they call Dar al Harb, literally, “the world of war.” So, you are either a Muslim or you are an infidel and, by definition, a threat to Islam until you convert or are killed. This may seem harsh, but true believers in Islam hold all other religions in contempt. The view of Judaism is psychopathic. Christians do not fare much better. The contempt for Hindus and Buddhists, religions deemed not to have “a book,” completes the utter certitude of Muslims that they alone are truly religious. You might feel that way, too, if you were compelled to pray five times a day: at dawn, midday, late afternoon, sunset, and nightfall. There are five prescribed prayers and all are in Arabic, a language Arabs will tell you is superior to all others. Verbal grandiosity is greatly applauded by Arabs. When facts are trumped by “ideas,” however, you have entered Alice’s bizarre Wonderland. Badolato writes that: “An Arab’s concept of the world has occasionally been described as a series of seven concentric circles with the individual Arab at the center. Thus, he has his family, an extended family or tribe, an immediate geographic region, and then his country. It is within the family that the psychology of the Muslim Arab is formed and observers have noted that, “the fluctuation between a loving mother and stern disciplinarian father can add to the complexity of growing up and often fosters schizoid personality traits.” To put it another way, Arabs can go from hot to cold and back again so fast that it is bewildering. Arabs live in a black and white world with no shadings of gray.

More @ ChronWatch http://tinyurl.com/mo82g