Not all cultures are equal: How Arabs’ shame-honor obsession blew up their societies

Literally.l

The PLO’s ammo depot in 1982 and Hezbollah’s ammonia storage, 2020:

“Following the explosion, there were suspicions regarding Hezbollah’s involvement due to allegations that the explosion occurred at a site storing Hezbollah’s weapons. Hezbollah denied these allegations but has been actively involved in demonstrations against the investigation into the explosion.”

In the previous article we saw visuals of 1960s and 1970s vs current Beirut, Baghdad, Kabul, Tehran and other Muslim capitals. State and societal failure across most of the Muslim world is impossible to understand without digging into its roots in:

• Muslim supremacist honor restoration by removing the stain of shame from the fact of Israel’s mere existence. In the choice between Jews without dhimmitude* and dhimmitude without Jews, every Muslim state from Morocco to Pakistan chose the latter.

• Male supremacy = honor. If lost, its restoration = honor restoration.

• Jihad and martyrdom purify Islam, which restores Muslim honor.

It’s the highest value and hardest currency of Arab society; a tribal value which predates Islam. In defeat honor is preserved and shame avoided only through martyrdom — an Arab version of Japan’s Bushido warrior code.

• Which purges Muslim society of shame from centuries of defeat at the hands of the infidel West.

• A belief that modernization without westernization is essential to maintain Muslim societies’ traditional religious and gender hierarchies.

Modernity triggered Muslim religious authorities’ moral panic that westernization would undermine male supremacy. In the 1890s Salafist scholar Rashid Rida wrote with this desperate sense of cultural and moral panic about the threat posed by importing women’s emancipation into Muslim societies. His book

“condemned the calls for equality between men and women in the workplace and in politics and warned about the folly of imitating Western women in their misguided ways. Rida declared that calls for “the liberation of women” and other social reforms by the modernisers were destroying the very fabric of Islamic societies.”

Mission Impossible: modernization without westernization

But modernity without westernizing hierarchy demolition in religious and ethnic minority and gender rights is simply impossible. It’s a recipe for state and societal failure; a permanent and increasingly violent cul-de-sac. In these two Beirut explosions nearly 40 years apart we see a perfect laboratory of state and societal failure that tell us that the true sources of Muslim state and societal failure lie not in Zionism, western colonialism and imperialism, but in the mirror failed Muslim states and societies refuse to look in.

The delusion of “lighting up Tel Aviv with rockets” blew up Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Gaza and billionaire Hamas kleptocrat Ismail Haniyeh’s Tehran hotel room. Centuries of geopolitical defeat pose a permanent affront to an Islamic faith for which geopolitical expansion was proof of possessing Allah’s final revelation; of theological legitimacy.

The empty shell of the Lebanese state rebuffed Israel’s offer of aid and solidarity. Acceptance would have implied holding the PLO accountable in 1982 and Hezbollah and Iran accountable in 2020.

Iran’s involvement

“Behnam Shahriyari is a senior official within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), specifically associated with Unit 190, a division responsible for clandestine arms transfers and logistical operations. He has been implicated in arms smuggling, money laundering, and oil trafficking on behalf of the IRGC Quds Force. Reports indicate that since 2011, the Iranian shipping company Liner Transport Kish (LTK), managed by Shahriyari and Mojtaba Mousavi Tabar, delivered significant quantities of ammonium nitrate to Hezbollah. Between 2011 and 2014, multiple shipments were sent to Beirut, including a consignment transported aboard the MV Rhosus vessel in August 2013, carrying approximately 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate.”

Self-medicating through shame-honor obsession

A pervasive and toxic shame-honor culture drives this blame Jews/Israel/Zionists avoidance of looking in the miror at all costs. The Muslim world is not alone in fighting a losing wrestling match with modernity whose premises are rule of law and increased gender equality. Victimhood-driven Putinist Russia and neo-confederate theocratic protectionist xenophobic Trumpkins do the same.

Modernization without westernization yields institutional cross-dressing

Cultures that demolish rule of law institutions to pursue class, tribe and ethnic hierarchy and male supremacy restoration destroy themselves. Cultures that were never governed by such institutions will descend even lower into the abyss of state and societal failure. The Muslim axis of failed states — Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan, soon to be joined by Iran, provide proof. They’re institutional cross-dressers; dressed up as states but really mafias or family businesses with flags.

As we see millions of people voting with their feet by fleeing to the secular democratic more gender equal West from a violently misgoverned theocratic Muslim world, it makes sense to ask this politically incorrect question: which cultures treat women and ethnic and religious minorities better?

Those shouting loudest for Palestine and DEI in the West never pose this simple question about the Muslim world. MeToo unless you’re a Jew feminists and Queers for Palestine take note:

This is the values universe drawn in the map, which is what Richard Dawkins objects to importing: