By: Lot Hildegard
Jordan Daily - As a former resident of the West Bank, married to a woman who was a journalist in the Gulf region for some years, I have often remarked sarcastically on how surprising it is that our native U.S.A. should ever make a mistake in the Middle East, considering that the U.S. is home to 340 million experts on that oft-troubled territory. Most Americans can't find anything on a world map, but let there be a crisis in the Middle East and everyone has an opinion.
About twenty years ago, a top-level counter-terrorism official in the U.S. government testified to a Congressional committee that he did not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'a Muslim. He was in no way exceptional. Whenever the Middle East and Muslims come to the fore in American affairs, my wife and I marvel at the shallowness and inanity of government officials, and of the media folk who help the populace remain in its benighted condition.
Though one could write an article on three plus one hundred things Americans don't understand about the Middle East, the following three are especially relevant to the current conflict between Iran and the U.S.-Israel alliance:
Liberals Don't Understand the Concept of Religion as Ultimate Truth
American liberals are unequipped to deal with or discuss any movement or regime motivated by the idea that a theistic religion conveys the ultimate truth about the Author and Finisher of the universe and how he wishes for humans to behave as individuals and as societies. For liberals, religion is a lifestyle choice, like which brand of yogurt to eat or which brand of yoga pants to wear. It's about feeling good, or being nice, or feeling good about being nice. Liberals are dismayed that anyone, at home or abroad, would take all this God business really, really seriously.
Many liberals adorn their automobiles with bumper stickers on which symbols of various world religions are fashioned into the word "COEXIST." This pleasant-sounding admonition is actually a demand that everyone polish the edges off their beliefs so the owner of that car can enjoy a certain kind of relativistic secular materialist societal structure.
Anyone who thinks that way is going to have trouble believing that highly charged Middle East religious movements are quite real, but of course they are. In Iran's case, the Obama administration with its nuclear deal appears to have tried to base foreign policy on the sentiments of a bumper sticker.
Conservatives Don't Try to Understand Religions Other than Their Own
When I was in theological college in the United Kingdom, I told one of my very few conservative, traditionally minded classmates that I had decided to sub-specialize in Islamic studies. He beheld me with a puzzled expression and replied, "Why would you study the Muslims? They're wrong, you know." He wasn't impressed much by my rejoinder about the importance of Islam in history, the vastness of its presence in today's world, and its increasing prominence in British society.
I have found that my friend's viewpoint is not unique among people who at least theoretically believe religion can express ultimate truth, a common point of view among political conservatives. They believe that since they possess the highest wisdom, learning what anyone else thinks, or why, is pointless.
While I sympathize with many conservative grievances about today's American school system, I am dismayed that so many concerned parents have embraced the fallacy that to discuss something is to promote it. When I took a world history course in high school, the textbook taught us the basics of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Shinto for the simple reason that even a basic understanding of cultures and history is impossible without this. My teacher, a dedicated Baptist, did her job superbly–and no one complained. Today she would be run out of town for indoctrinating children into heathenism.
Every day, American officialdom seems truly mystified that Iran hasn't given up yet. C'est la guerre when you don't understand what motivates the opposition.
Israel Is Not About the Jewish Religion
Hitler killed Jews of all kinds: religious Jews, Jews who practiced some religion other than Judaism, Jews who were not religious in any way. The Holocaust was a matter of ethnicity. So is Israel. A Gallup poll in 2015 determined that 65 percent of Israeli Jews considered themselves not to be religious (in contrast to 75 percent of Palestinian Arab West Bank residents who identify as religious). This is not a matter of typical post-modern secularization but is rather the original or chronic condition of the country, which was founded by mostly secular Zionists who considered the Jewish faith a liability except insofar as it was useful for selling religious people on the idea of a Jewish state. The early Zionists weren't even especially enthusiastic about locating their new "homeland" in the Levant, but they knew that a Biblical site was necessary for the support of religious Jews and sentimental Christians.
Religious Jews in Israel do have a higher birthrate than the non-religious, and their influence on politics is very much on the rise, but they do not represent the character of the nation as a whole. When Benjamin Netanyahu refers to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, that's not because he's a man of God. It's because he's playing American Zionists like Heifetz playing a Stradivarius.
And so here we are.
The current war is a fine mess with all of the ingredients of a global apocalyptic catastrophe. Think of Armageddon as a great big party: American liberals have given confidence to people who otherwise might not have been sure they were up to attending, conservatives have designed the invitations, and the whole jamboree appears to be happening mostly to please Israel, on the basis of American Zionists' ridiculous misconceptions about who and what the Israelis are.
It's often been said that Americans don't care about ideas, but Americans actually care a great deal about ideas in the sense that Americans love explanations. Evil and folly are what happen when people look for explanations instead of looking for the truth. Bertrand Russell elegantly said that Hitler–a man who had an explanation for everything–lost World War II "because he didn't understand the situation." After it was all over, the American Admiral Raymond Spruance, asked by his wife what the war had been like, replied with characteristic succinctness: "It was interesting."
We live in interesting times–and Americans don't understand the situation.
Lot Hildegard is a Christian theologian and freelance writer who spent two years at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and has taught in a Palestinian university and in an American Muslim school. His social commentary and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of print and online publications.
