(continued)
...It will be a tragedy if Arabs and Muslims adopt the position that there is no conceivable reason why Americans might be upset with them today and that any criticism they face in the U.S. media is entirely the result of some Jewish campaign of vilification.
Why a tragedy? First, because it will reinforce all the reasons why the Arab-Muslim world has fallen behind in economic development, education, science and democratization. Because whenever a people reduces all its problems to a conspiracy by someone else, it absolves itself and its leaders of any responsibility for its predicament — and any need for self-examination. No civilization has ever prospered with that approach. (And several courageous Arab journalists have started to point that out.)
Blaming someone else is not a substitute for analyzing or coping. (That also applies to Israelis who say Yasir Arafat, alone, is the source of all their problems.) Only in a society that embraces self-criticism can the political process produce real facts to cope with real problems. Look at the excruciating process of analysis, self-criticism and accountability that America went through after Vietnam. Few Arab-Muslim countries have ever done anything like that after a war, let alone after 9/11. Until they do, their conclusion that America or the Jews are behind all their problems is escapism, not analysis.
Second, persisting in this will only widen the gulf between America and the Muslim world because such conspiracy theories are based on a total misunderstanding of America. The standard view of America in the Arab-Muslim world is that America is rich and powerful because it is crass and materialistic. And since America is just about material interests — not values — why can't it understand that its real material interests are with the Arabs, not with Israel? The Jews must be manipulating things.
The truth is exactly the opposite. America is successful and wealthy because of its values, not despite them. It is prosperous because of the way it respects freedom, individualism and women's rights and the way it nurtures creativity and experimentation. Those values are our inexhaustible oil wells. Americans naturally gravitate toward societies that share those same values, and they recoil from those that don't.
There are two kinds of blame: one that is a result of self-analysis and self-criticism, and one that is an attempt to avoid self-analysis and self- criticism. We have all known people who endlessly blame their mothers or fathers for all their shortcomings, never themselves. Some eventually grow out of it and thrive. Some never do — and they go through life angry, miserable and never achieving their full potential.