The post-truth era in relation to the Middle East

I have spent some time on the website of The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) over the years. The purpose of MEMRI is:

Exploring the Middle East and South Asia through their media, MEMRI bridges the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, Dari, Turkish, Russian, and Chinese media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends to the governments of the U.S. and its allies, and to their counterterrorism officials, law enforcement agencies, militaries, and other authorities. 

This is not some crazy partisan propaganda outfit. Past US Presidents have served on its board of advisors. Its current board of directors includes a former US Attorney-General. It serves an important function (or could, if more people would use it) in helping us understand the thinking both of people in the Middle East and people from the region who now live among us.

Their content is depressing. You can see children being indoctrinated. You can see how issues in the region are portrayed in their everyday media. If someone grows up in these countries, constantly exposed to hatred – even in classrooms – they’re in for a shock if they move to the West. If, that is, they make any attempt to expose themselves to local culture. If they don’t then it’s you and I who are in for the shock. Here’s a mild sample. 

Having watched a few hours of MEMRI content over the years, I should not have been surprised when Muslim neighbours – the Mohammeds and Ahmeds who routinely deliver me and my goods or serve me in their shops in West London – took to the streets to celebrate the October 7 pogrom in Israel. Half a mile from where I live, they danced for joy and called for the destruction of Israel. This, before the Jewish state had responded in any way – making a nonsense of the line taken by most Palestinian apologists that they don’t support Hamas’s actions (to the extent they don’t actually deny them) but are merely protesting the alleged ferocity of Israel’s response.

I had a wonderful career overseas but in retirement there’s a price to pay. I have only three good friends in London and two of them are older than me. Most of the people I could socialise with in my retirement live in Warsaw, Prague or Moscow. My London friends and acquaintances are not woke (one is a Catholic who is hoping Pope Francis will be replaced by an actual Christian) but their thinking is informed by the relentless statist propaganda of Britain’s mainstream media. They automatically hear the word “unregulated” as a criticism, for example. As if only activities supervised by state employees could ever be good. They would all agree that regulators sometimes go “too far,” but also think that I go too far in supporting Montesquieu’s view that:

When it is not necessary to make a law it is necessary NOT to make a law

They consider me an extremist for holding views that were perfectly ordinary throughout the rise of Western Civilisation. The ideas, in my view, that caused that rise. They would all instinctively chuckle at Ghandi’s famous reply to a journalist who asked him what he thought of Western Civilsation, which was:

I think it would be a good idea.

They’re not as extreme as many of my contemporaries in London. Not that I selected them for their views. I can be friends with any decent human. I don’t need them to be free from error. But I often pick up on things that remind me they’ve been exposed to two decades more of indoctrination on multiculturalism than I was when I was working as a proud Englishman among proud Poles, Russians and Chinese.

The Ancient Greeks said you can never step in the same river twice. While I was away for twenty years, blithely praising the superiority of Western thought to the survivors of Soviet socialism, Britain was changing behind my back. The greatest culture shock I ever received was not moving to Poland, Russia or even China. It was moving back home when I was done.

Only one of my friends is so far gone as to have imbibed the narrative of the intifada and support the notion that Israel, in seeking to liberate its hostages and defeat the terrorists who were attacking it constantly even before October 7, is committing “genocide”. I try to avoid the topic. She has many virtues and I love her as a friend, but she won’t let it drop. I have tried to explain that I operate on NATO’s “no first strike” policy. If she doesn’t read my blog, she’s never going to hear me bang on, unprovoked, about the justice of Israel’s cause. Unless, that is,  she bangs on herself about the rectitude of terrorists.

Yet she insists on sending me snippets of kefiyah-wearers justifying evil. Her late husband moved in London Labour circles and all her friends are very much of the Left. Among themselves they don’t speak of Right and Left these days, of course. They speak of Left and Wrong. They don’t review the actual rate of civilian casualties in urban warfare in Gaza – though the Israel Defence Force (IDF) is performing better than the Allies in WW2. They just assume uncritically that the brown people are right and the nasty (ideologically-white, if not all actually so) Jews are wrong. They don’t need to say any of this out loud, you understand. It’s just the political water in which they swim. 

The British Left seems to have worked its way back to where it was before Hitler (we all thought finally) discredited anti-semitism. Stalin would have ended WW2 – as he started it – on Hitler’s side – had Hitler not favoured (as Socialists often do) schism over solidarity. If you spend some time in the stacks at a university library (as I once did) and read the English newspapers of the 1930′s, you’ll find that Hitler’s views on the Jews did not cause as much alarm as you might think. He was a worry, with his talk of a master race and lebensraum, but the “blame the Jews” stuff was seen as superfluous seasoning in his rhetorical soup. Rather like my London friends today on regulation, the intellectuals of the time took the view he sometimes went “a bit too far”.

If I had spent my whole life here, instead of abroad, I would firstly be more acclimatised to this horror and would secondly have a deep enough pool of friends to throw this one back. I  am reluctant, however, to lose 33% of my close friends at once. Nor, at the age of 68 – and with the cautious pace at which we English make friends – am I ever going to make any more.

I sometimes wonder if my exciting overseas career, unalloyed joy at the time, was a mistake. My father, a man firmly rooted in the place our family seems to have lived since prehistory, made very different choices and was always puzzled by mine. At his funeral, a normally-dead church that can’t afford a vicar came to life by being filled with everyone he’d ever known still capable of walking (or being wheeled) up its path. His choices made a lot of sense to me at that moment. I could understand his marvelous statement to the family at his bedside, hours before he died, that he was “the happiest man alive”. He was rooted in family and community. He had friends “for fetching out” as they say up North.

I have made a temporary peace by getting my friend to agree not to raise the subject again until she’s read a book from the other point of view. I chose this one and have sent her a copy. I give her credit for agreeing to that, though I fear she’ll – with no sense of irony – dismiss it as extremist propaganda.

I do not understand how a kind and caring person can find herself on the side of evil. Yet, to watch the BBC or read the Guardian, you’d think (as she does) that every educated person in Britain is.  That brings me to another piece of my late father’s wisdom. He once told me that – whatever medical advances may come – it’s better that we all die because the world changes so fast that if we live too long, we won’t fit in.