The anniversary of T.E. Lawrence’s death: yet another occasion for phony Western guilt mongering

On the seventieth anniversary of the death of T.E. Lawrence following a motorcycle accident on a Dorset road, James Barr writing in the Telegraph portrays the British involvement with the Arab Revolt, of which Lawrence was the key figure, as a symbol of British perfidy: “Britain’s failure to honour its initial promise to the Arabs [to support the creation of an Arab state under Sherif Hussein] created a reservoir of deep resentment on which opponents of the West have regularly drawn,” he writes. Unforgivably, Barr leaves out of his account the fact that within a couple of years of that initial failure to honor their promise to Sherif Hussein, the British created the Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq, ruled by Hussein’s son Prince Feisal (which was overthrown in the late 1950s), and Jordan, ruled by Hussein’s other son Prince Abdallah (which persists to this day), as well as helping the Arabs toward independence in Arabia (though the Sauds subsequently overthrew the Hashemites). For Barr to mention solely the initial British betrayal of the Arabs, and to be silent about their subsequent substantive honoring of their commitment, and to make the initial betrayal into the most important fact in a saga of British guilt, symbolizes the suicidal Western self-hatred that is evident today in the American government’s notion that we owe it to the Arabs to demonstrate our good intentions toward them, while Arabs have no similar obligation to us; and that if any Westerner ever does anything offensive to Moslems, or is even falsely reported to have done so, well, Moslems should riot and kill.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 19, 2005 07:10 AM | Send