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By Root 808 0

at an empty salt cellar who is compelled to talk about Jewish domination of the medieval salt trade or a monopoly ‘they’ have recently acquired in the Camargue. Although Israel is home to large numbers of conservative Orthodox Jews, it is also an outpost of Western secular modernity. That last part is what Islamists hate, especially when it is combined with the manifest superiority of the high-tech Israeli economy in the region. Instead of allowing this to fructify the neighbourhood commercially, the jihadists are bent on enveloping it in the chaos and violence they create everywhere.

In their view, Israel is the modern incarnation of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, a crusader outpost planted among Muslims by an imperialist West which the Jews control, a claim that passes over the half-millennium that separates the crusades from the age of European imperialism, and accords ‘the Jews’ more power than they could conceivably possess. Intervening events, like the Protestant revolt against the medieval papacy, and the multiplication of hundreds of Protestant denominations, figure not at all in Islamist understanding of the West, which is routinely chastised for not comprehending the division between Sunni and Shia. This is because Islam, at least in Arabia, has overwritten societies where kin or clan are paramount, resulting in indifference or hostility to what lies beyond. In the very few instances where Christians have attacked Muslims (and vice versa), such as Serbia or Indonesia, these attacks have not been endorsed by any Christian religious authorities of any standing. There have been no Christian calls for an anti-Muslim crusade, unlike the many voices demanding warlike jihad.55

There is something narcissistic about this assumption that the West is obsessed with Islam and seeks to destroy it. It is not. It is obsessed with itself, followed by China, India and Russia which jostle for Westerners’ short attention span. It is drawn, wearily, into so many Middle Eastern crises because this region, with a manufacturing capacity only equal to that of the telecommunications giant Nokia in Finland, is the primary source of instability in the modern world and sits on top of two-thirds of known oil reserves. If huge oil deposits were to be discovered beneath Canada, the West would disengage from the Middle East tomorrow, leaving it to implode amid its multiple conflicts. The West’s crusading impulse is allegedly ‘in our blood’, despatching armed might into the Muslim heartlands to dole out death at the flick of a switch on a console. This massive technological superiority was bitterly resented as it made Arabs seem impotent on any conventional battlefield, reduced to hot spots on the computer screens of electronic weapons systems. Crude conspiracy theories mask entirely local responsibilities. The ‘English agent’ and ‘Jewish criminal’ Kemal Atatürk’s abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 destroyed the only institutional basis for resistance, an institution the most extreme jihadists intend to restore.

Some Western secular trends come among traditional societies silently like thieves in the night, notably monogamy and the atomisation of the family, common nowadays among middle-class Iranians. But, notwithstanding the corruption, drugs and vice endemic in many Muslim societies, in their eyes the West is uniquely decadent, hedonistic and secular (despite the US being the most religious society on the planet), spreading its moral pollution, not only through Coca-Cola capitalism, Baywatch and MTV, but via the indiscriminate exportation of a vulgar architectural modernism that dwarfed the delicate traditional Islamic architecture of the Middle Ages, not least the minarets of mosques. Globalisation has a way of making mutual hypocrisies visible. Rich Arabs get drunk, gamble, shop and whore in London or Paris. From Dubai to the Maldives, streams of Western tourists descend on traditional societies courtesy of cheap air travel, blissfully unaware of how others might perceive them and wholly ignorant of local mores.56 If this was one