Call it the relativism of absoluteness if you want, but
that's what Clifford D. May has just discovered, though he still has a long way
to go before he'll see the full landscape of this convoluted condition.
He wrote: “Does Al Jazeera deserve to die?” an article that
also came under the subtitle: “Reporting the news is not the primary mission of
the Qatari-owned network,” published on July 25, 2017 in The Washington Times.
Clifford May does not respond directly to the question
that's in the title of his article because he likes the idea that Al Jazeera is
in the Middle East attacking what he views as the despotic regimes of the
region. But he also dislikes the idea that Al Jazeera is owned by a regime
that's no different from those it is attacking.
And so, Clifford May does what comes naturally to those who
– like the owners of Al Jazeera – try to extract something from the existing
condition by milking it … doing so while giving away nothing in return. In
fact, he wants the “Western media professionals” to learn how Al Jazeera does
it, having himself embraced the teaching of the al Qaeda leader who said, “More
than half of this war is taking place on the battlefield of the media”.
But look what just happened. Clifford May says that the
despotic rulers of the Middle East as well as the owners of Al Jazeera and the
leader of al Qaeda are not different from each other when it comes to the way
they treat the media and how they use it. Moreover, he discloses that he has grown
to love the capabilities these people have developed, and wishes that the
Western media professionals do as much.
But how does that stack up against what he used to preach
until now? Well, he used to say that the world was divided into two distinct factions
as different from each other as black and white. He would take pains to explain
that there was no gray area between them because a sharp demarcation line kept
them clearly and absolutely separated. One side was made of good guys; the
other of bad guys.
There is no doubt now that Clifford May will have to drop
the view he used to hold about the structure of the ideological landscape being
absolute. But because it will be impossible for him to make a hundred and
eighty-degree turn and adopt the view that everything is relative, he'll be
forced to create a third condition that's neither absolute nor relative but one
to which he may give the oxymoron name “relative absoluteness.” And he'll be
named the pioneer that started the science of the three-sided coin.
You'll understand how Clifford May got trapped in that
logical conundrum when you find out how blown away he was by the discovery that
his belief in the structure of everything being of the binary “either or” kind,
does not apply in the Arab World, and perhaps in some other places too. Here is
how that revelation came to him:
He first noticed that the Gulf Cooperation Council comprises
six nations, “all of them Arab, Sunni, ruled by royals and wealthy thanks to
vast reserves of petroleum,” who were not best friends as he expected. He then
learned that three were joined in a common cause by Egypt that's neither oil-rich nor
monarchical, but completing the quartet of solidarity. There goes the theory of
birds of the feather sticking together. And there goes Clifford May's view of a
coin that's made of two separate and unequal sides. Welcome theory of the
three-sided coin.
All of that prompted the writer to recall the saying:
“hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue,” leaving no doubt that he means
to say Qatar
is the vicious and hypocritical party, paying tribute to someone. But what's
the tribute, and who is the virtuous recipient? We can find out by employing
the process of elimination as follows:
Listing all the parties that he mentions minus Qatar and Al
Jazeera, there remains two groups. One is the Arab quartet, the other Al-Qaeda
and the Western media professionals. That is, either the Arabs are virtuous and
deserve praise whereas the terrorists and the Western media are villains, or it
is the other way around.
But Clifford May spent a lifetime professing his hatred for
the Arabs, except on this occasion when he seems to tolerate them somewhat. As
well, he spent a lifetime loving and “protecting” the democratic nature of the
Western media, except on this occasion when he seems to dislike them somewhat.
So, what's he to do?