Bret Stephens is confused about history. How do I know this,
you ask? I'll tell you how I know it. He not only repeated a point that Bernard
Lewis made, he built on it … sort of … or maybe not.
I admit I have not read all or even most of what Lewis has
written, but the little that I did convinced me not to waste my time reading
more Bernard Lewis stuff. You see, my friend, the Jews have two things tattooed
on their foreheads. One tattoo reads: Blame your troubles on the entire human
race or a segment of it, whichever is convenient at the time. And the other
tattoo reads: Accuse everyone else of the sins you see in yourself. And that's
what Bernard Lewis did … or something like it.
For many centuries before him, the Jews were blaming
Christianity for all their troubles without ever admitting they shared
responsibility for what was happening to them. After suffering several pogroms,
the fight they were leading against Christianity culminated in the Holocaust
that consumed them. They vacated Europe, the home of the Christians, and
settled in the Middle East , the home of the
Muslim Arabs. Once there, it took them little time to start blaming their
troubles on the Arabs and the Muslims.
Bernard Lewis became the leading voice in the choir that
sang the new song of blame and victimization. But sensing that people were
getting tired of the redundant refrain with which the Jews first blamed
Christianity and now Islam, he fell on the message of the second tattoo thus
turned reality upside down. He started accusing the Arabs of what he saw in
himself, a false description of the Arabs that proved him unfit to be a
historian.
What Lewis should have done before erecting a monument of
historical quackery, is study real history to identify a pattern he could use
as model for what he was about to put together. A good example would have been
the study in contrast between China
and Japan .
Like the Arabs of a century ago, the Chinese of two centuries ago refused to
emulate the ways of the rising Western powers because they thought they didn't
need to. Seeing things differently, the Japanese emulated the West and caught
up with it whereas China
stagnated.
To this day, the Arab leaders have not admitted they had
been stagnating for a while. They are now going full speed ahead adopting the
Western ways, but that's only because their public is pushing them in that
direction. It is that the masses have understood their system was deficient,
and blamed not outside powers, but their own leaders for the deficiency. Thus
neither the Arab leaders nor the public have ever blamed outside powers for
their troubles or their lack of progress. This shows Bernard Lewis to be a fake
and a master mutilator of history … which is why I do not waste time reading
him.
But that's not what Bret Stephens is doing. You can see what
he says in the column he wrote under the title: “Who Did This to Us?” and the
subtitle: “Donald Trump asks that question. So do Putin, Erdogan and Black
Lives Matter.” It was published on August 30, 2016 in the Wall Street Journal.
Stephens started the project on shaky grounds and built on it a dubious
monument.
Here is his shaky starting point: “Bernard Lewis once made
the point...” And here is the dubious model he is trying to amplify: “Mr. Lewis
was writing about the Islamic world's destructive habit of blaming its ills on
imperialism, Jews and other assorted bogeymen”.
Let me now make a confession. By the time I finished reading
the Stephens column, I got the feeling that things were not what they seemed to
be, but that the author had scored a master stroke. Here is what I began to
think was happening: Seeing Bernard Lewis turn 100 while sitting on a work that
history will judge to be mediocre at best, Stephens tried to whitewash that
work by diluting its harsh moments. He did it by attributing the “Arab
destructive habit” to everyone else on the planet, including Britain and the United States .
It is as if Stephens was saying: Yes Lewis accused the Arabs
of suffering from the habit of blaming others for their ills, but so does
everyone else. It is just that Lewis did not get around to talking about
everyone else. Were he to live another 100 years, he may do just that.