Be advised that the use of the word “men” in the title
stands for the males and females of the human species. As to the word
“dimensional,” it refers to the degree of sophistication that a culture has
reached in sensing, grasping and deciphering the social nuances of the other
cultures.
For example, a one-dimensional man would look at a fight
between two people of a different culture, or even his own, and be entertained
by the grappling; be it physical or verbal. A two dimensional man, looking at
the same fight, would wonder which one will win so that he may root for him,
thus be “on the right side of history.” A three dimensional man would look at
the fight and reckon that complex issues between the two must have proved too
difficult for them to untangle and resolve.
I came up with these abstract examples to respond to the
article that came under the title: “One for the graveyard of Middle East
predictions” and the subtitle: “'The New Lion of Damascus' gets Syria's dictator
embarrassingly wrong,” written by Daniel Pipes and published on August 8, 2017
in The Washington Times. Before I discuss the Pipes article, let me cite two
real-life examples.
First example, when a tribal chief in a remote area of South
Africa heard of what happened on 9/11, he expressed sorrow for W. Bush (the
leader of the tribe called America,) and offered to donate a number of cows,
sheep and whatever else to ease the pain of the American. Clearly, the South
African tribal chief had no notion what a modern economy or a modern system of
governance look like, thus responded as if W. Bush were a tribal chief whose
twin houses were destroyed, was now destitute and was accepting charity.
Look how that same sentiment was manifested in a more
sophisticated setting. After the 1967 surprise Israeli attack on the
Soviet-made warplanes of the Egyptian air force, American journalists (unaware
that the planes were destroyed on the ground) asked President Nasser why he was
still friends with the Soviet Union when its warplanes proved inferior to the
French planes used by Israel. Nasser replied
that in the village from where he had come, when a family was hit by a tragedy,
the neighbors went to it bearing gifts and other offerings to ease the pain. In
a similar fashion, the Soviet Union came to Egypt bearing gifts and other
offerings to ease the pain of the tragedy it suffered.
Second example, when the propaganda arm of the American
government decided to polish the country's image in the Arab world, it launched
a television station to broadcast for the people of the region, and called it
“Alhurra,” which means “Free” in Arabic. To show the locals that the Americans
are not the demons the Arabs may think they are, Alhurra started out by
broadcasting footage of open spaces in the American West depicting the natural
beauty of a landscape where horses roam in the tundra … and other similar
scenes.
You can see in these examples that in each case, the people
who tried to transmit a message to someone did not suspect that because the
recipient may be living a different life, he will not relate to the message,
that he may not even understand it, and may, in some cases, consider it an
insult. It is obvious that the two-dimensional men who asked President Nasser
why he was still friends with the Soviet Union, and the one-dimensional men who
run the American propaganda machine are so close to the South African tribal
chief in terms of naïveté, they should be doing local programming, not
communicating with foreigners whose cultures they cannot come close to sensing,
grasping or deciphering.
Consider the reality of the Judeo-Israeli propaganda machine
incessantly drumming into the heads of the Arab masses that the American people
value the life of their pets and their wild horses more than they do Arab
lives. The proof, says the machine, is that America 's
leaders never tire stating that Israel
will always be given weapons so superior to theirs, it can obliterate them
anytime it wants … which is what many Americans hope to see.
At the same time, the same propaganda machine would be
telling America 's leaders
that the Arabs just wait to see daylight develop between their two countries to
pounce on Israel
and holocaust it to kingdom come. For this reason, the Jews argue that America 's
leaders must remind the Arabs there is no daylight between the two countries.
And they must publicly promise that America
will maintain Israel 's
military superiority at all time.
When an American leader of any stripe utters these words,
the Jews take the message to the Arabs and say to them: See! It's what we've
been telling you! And the Arab masses cannot help but believe what they see and
hear. And the television station Alhurra tries to fix the damage done by
telling those same Arabs that America
could not be populated by demons because – like they can see for themselves – America has
wild horses roaming the open spaces of the tundra. It does not tell them what
the connection is, but nobody at Alhurra has claimed to be a three-dimensional
man. And that's a saving grace we can be thankful for.
We now turn to the Daniel Pipes article. Being one of the
original architects who designed and presided over the execution of the scheme
to shut out the non-Jewish voices, and having been instrumental at mounting the
multi-decade propaganda campaign to demonize the Arabs and deify the Jews,
Daniel Pipes now writes about the predictions made by someone else without
mentioning the tons of predictions he made himself; predictions that led to the
horror we see unfold in the Levant at this time.