Sharif on Bush; Goldberg on Sharif

We’ve often wondered, before Busherino the Magnificent invaded Iraq with the millennial intention of turning it into a democracy, did he not get advice from anyone other than the damned neocons, who all assured him—from the great depths of their knowledge of human nature and world history—that democratizing Iraq was possible because all people desire freedom? Well, it turns out that he did get some non-neocon advice. Before the invasion, Egyptian movie actor Omar Sharif had a conversation with Bush and told him some true and essential things about the Arab world, as reported at Memri via the Corner:

Omar Sharif: The American policy is completely wrong. It is a large and rich country, with great possibilities, and everything, but they don’t understand what is going on in the rest of the world. They just don’t get it. I lived in America for a long time. Only 10% of all Americans have a passport. In other words, 90% never left America. They may have gone to Mexico or Canada, because they don’t need a visa or a passport to go there. 90% of them don’t know… You show them an unmarked map of Europe, and ask them where France is, and they don’t know. Ask them where Italy is… Okay, Italy they know because it looks like a shoe. They don’t know anything. They are ignorant.

I said to Bush, even before he entered Iraq: Forget about all that. We, the Arabs… We are not like [regular countries]. We are sects. This is how we have always been. Egypt is the exception, because we Egyptians are a people that… [I said to Bush:] If you enter Iraq—what will you do with the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds? You will drown there. You have Iran and Syria next to you—these are Shiites, and those are Sunnis. What do you know about all these things? You will drown there.

Interviewer: How did he respond?

Omar Sharif: He didn’t believe me. I told him that I come from the East and I know… He said: “No, there must be a democracy there.” I said to him: We don’t have a democracy, and we never will. You’ll see, because people like me prefer to go to the neighborhood sheik. I like going to him, and he resolves all the problems. If someone stole from you, or something, you take him to the neighborhood sheik, and you say: This man stole from me. The sheik says to him: Return the money, or never come back to the neighborhood.

“We are sects.” That is the key point. Arabs and Muslims do not live as individuals in relation to their whole society. They live as members of families, tribes, clans, with loyalty owed to those groups, not to other tribes or to the good of society as whole. And this means that their way of life, their culture, is fundamentally incompatible with representative government, in which the individual is represented politically because the individual is seen as a potential knower of truth. And that’s not even mentioning Islam, which forbids the individual from thinking for himself.

Bush of course would hear none of it. “He didn’t believe me…. He said: “No, there must be a democracy there.” Bush had superior insight, coming from possession of his world-encompassing ideology, the Bush Doctrine.

And now get Jonah Goldberg’s response:

I love that Omar Sharif bit from Memri. First, it’s a bit tough to take lectures from an Arab about the typical ignorance of Americans. I think Americans are woefully under-educated when it comes to all sorts of things, but given the huge problems with illiteracy in the Middle East, his native Egypt included, he’d be well-advised not to play those games. Last I checked, Americans weren’t clamoring to go to Arab schools in order to make a good living. But I also love the idea that an international jet-setter and former champion bridge player likes to have his conflicts settled by the local sheik. I’d love to know the last time that happened.

The ineffable vulgarity of Goldberg. He takes in none of Sharif’s substantive points, but just looks to dismiss him on cheap shots. First, it doesn’t occur to him that Egyptian ignorance of America is not the moral equivalent of American ignorance of the Muslim world, since Egypt is not claiming the right and ability to lead and reconstruct America, but America is claiming the right and ability to lead and reconstruct the Muslim world, and therefore American ignorance of the world outside itself is about 10,000 times more damaging than Egyptian ignorance of America. Second, how does Goldberg know that Sharif doesn’t go to the neighborhood sheik? Further, even if he doesn’t go to him, it’s irrelevant, because Sharif’s substantive point is not about himself, it’s about the fact that “people like me prefer to go to the neighborhood sheik”—meaning, Arabs.

I think it was Goldberg whom Ortega y Gasset had in mind when, in The Revolt of the Masses, he described Mass Man, the dominant type of modernity, as a man incapable of seeing anything higher or better than himself.

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An Indian living in the West writes:

I really liked that quote by Omar Sharif. There was so much honesty there. Often we hear Arabs who become reflexively defensive or hostile because a lack of democracy or modernisation is considered a sign of inferiority. There is none of that in the way Sharif saw it—this is the way we are and this is how we shall remain.

And that is precisely what liberals of all stripes will simply never accept (no matter how much they blabber about diversity). This love of diversity is a fraud. What they really want is for every man, woman and child on this earth to become a replica of modern mass man—just a faceless consumer in a giant market with no borders and no distinctions. If one truly loves diversity, one would abhor at the prospect of such a world. Why would anyone want Egypt or Lebanon (or Iraq) to look like New York City?

But Sharif’s comments also illustrate the inherent fanatical nature of Bush’s beliefs. Even when an Arab who knows more about his society than any American tells Bush that Arabs dont want democracy, he won’t listen. “No there must be democracy…”!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 02, 2008 11:17 PM | Send