Shelby Steele, a Black man and acknowledged authority on race relations in America, the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. Mr. Steele has held a Fellowship at the Hoover Instituted since 1994. I have been an ardent reader of Mr. Steel’s works for years. At times my own opinions differ from his, but more often I must agree. There is no sense in me giving his bio in this post since you can just google his name and learn a great deal about him. And, please do for he is a man to know and read no matter what your position is on race relations.
In this posts I want to explore his article on Western guilt or White Guilt which he claims “blinds us to the nature of Islamic extremism.”
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008852
Life and Death BY SHELBY STEELE
Sunday, August 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
“White guilt in the West--especially in Europe and on the American left--confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don't hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism, not their continuance, forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.”
Mr. Steele explains that Islamic hatred of the Jew and the Infidel is in reality a self hatred, an admission that Muslims as a people are less capable, less worthy and perhaps less worthy in God’s eyes. This hatred and sublimated self hatred began not with colonialism, but after. After the West left the Muslims territory and took with them the enthusiasm to move into the future.
One picture I saw years ago has stuck with me and I think exemplifies the concept Mr. Steele is explaining. The photograph was of a modern airport with a jet plane taking off in the background and a man on a camel in the foreground. I remember the caption suggested the photo was representative of East meeting West. I disagreed as I saw it as man’s advancing towards the future but still being held back by the past. The East is mired down in the past and incapable of moving into the future because they are unwilling to let loose of the past. The old ways, the old beliefs hold them captive while they envy the West the modernism that makes life more comfortable.
Islamic Extremism then is not a desire for territory or to address grievances because all attempts to return territory or to address grievances has been scorned. To accept territory and to accept reparations for grievances would require the Muslims then to do something with the territory and reparation. To do something they see themselves incapable of doing. Instead they set themselves the task of doing what can not be seen or measured by humanity. Islamic Extremism is an attempt to prove Muslims hatred of the Infidel makes them more worthy in God’s eyes. They scorn life and embrace death (which they claim is following God's dictates) as proof that they are superior to the life loving Infidel.
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Once the above concept is accepted it is an easy step to understanding why the West is incapable of understanding the East and therefore are conducting the war m with Muslims Terrorist on a false premise. A false premise of White guilt for slavery, for colonialism, for being superior in the world today. To augment this overall White Guilt we in the West have our own left thinking individuals who are our own worst enemies and continually and erroneously pricking the collective conscious. These actions and beliefs from our own Left then makes legitimate the East’s claim of oppression.
(This article was written during the Israeli and Hezballah War so examples are geared to that particular period.) “Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel's historical contradiction, her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression.” And the same applies today to our war in Iraq.
Furthermore, Steele points out that the West’s White Guilt is the East’s most dangerous weapon and the one thing that will , if not overcome, allow the terrorism to continue to live and grow unless we understand we are not to blame and finally force the East to see their own culpability and use our superior might to finally defeat terrorism. Steele claims our White Guilt is forcing us to tolerate and actually lose wars to the Muslims.
“But white guilt's most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility, if still quite remote, for the Islamic world to seek power through contribution rather than through menace.”
Something to think about , isn't it? BB