The Middle East fantasy land

James Lewis:

What do these episodes have in common?

Item:

A few years ago an Egyptian college professor wrote that subatomic particles must be the "jinns" or Arabian desert spirits that Mohammed wrote about in the Koran. As a devout Muslim this scientifically educated man was convinced that fundamental physics must have been completely known to Allah when he dictated the infallible Koran to the Prophet, fourteen centuries ago.

Item:
When Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948, the President of Syria said to a Palestinian Arab leader that

"I am happy to tell you that our Army and its equipment are of the highest order and well able to deal with a few Jews; and I can tell you in confidence that we even have an atom bomb... Yes, it was made locally; we fortunately found a very clever fellow, a tin smith..." (R. Patai, 1973, p. 51).

Item:
Over the last several years the outlandish Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist fiction intended to bamboozle Russian peasants around 1900, has been turned into a TV soap opera for millions of slack-jawed viewers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

What do these episodes have in common? All of them tell about millions of Middle Eastern men and women who are immersed in an imaginary world. Remember Baghdad Bob? He was the Saddam propaganda guy who was convinced that his fantasies were more real than the US armored forcees storming into Baghdad. The Baghdad Bob syndrome is not so unusual.

Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, a gathering of international misfits, proto-Nazis and religious zealots, adds another chapter to a bizarre kind of mass self-hypnosis. Ahmadinejad is a Khomeini-inspired hate monger, pushing a narrative that carries its believers ever farther away from the real world.

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Ahmadinejad is supposed to have a graduate degree in engineering, but he has a Seventh Century mind. It operates backwards, starting from a passionately desired answer to the imaginary evidence needed to prove it. Holding a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran is as good as disproving the Holocaust; claiming uranium enrichment is equivalent to actually doing it; and saying that Israel is doomed comes close to making it so. Back in reality, of course, the effect has been to startle sane people into seeing what a dangerous gang of pre-medieval lunatics have now seized control of the strategic keystone of Iran. Ahmadinejad is his own worst enemy.

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Perhaps he is a believer in the power of positive visualization where the unconscience mind cannot tell the difference from the real events. But like sexual predators, their fantasies can cause real problems when they clash with the real world.