Foreign Demons

Schadenfreude!

Teutonic talk for that delightful shivery delight at thoroughly enjoying a near field competitor suffering misfortune, agony or discomfort.

As best understood, sunny sunny climes centered on or around Suez were plagued with foreign devils - colonialism, the otherism - everything that made certain nation states in the new millennium consider a wheel barrow as a great invention - were the fault of the wicked woman worshiping West

Check it

Very few Arabs believed that the landscape all around them—the tyrannical states, the growing poverty, the destruction of what little grace their old cities once possessed, the war across the generations between secular fathers and "Slamist children—was the harvest of their own history. It was easier to believe that the Americans had willed those outcomes.

In truth, in the decade prior to 9/11, America had paid the Arab world scant attention. We had taken a holiday from history's exertions. But the Arabs had hung onto their belief that a willful America disposed of their fate. The Arab regimes possessed their own sources of power—fearsome security apparatuses, money in the oil states, official custodians of religion who gave repression their seal of approval. 

The pathology that mattered was that of otherwise reasonable men and women who were glad for America's torment. The Americans had might, but were far away. Now the terrorism, like a magnet, drew them into Arab and Muslim lands. Now they were near, and they would be entangled in the great civil war raging over the course of Arab and Muslim history.

The Arabs barely took notice when America struck the Taliban in Kabul. What was Afghanistan to them? It was a blighted and miserable land at a safe distance. 

The American war, and the sense of righteous violation, soon hit the Arab world itself. The toppling of Iraq's regime, some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the Arabs.

And Great Satan brought more than the world famous M16 or M1 panzers, bay bee! She brought the alien ideas of self determination (indeed Araby has long co opted the greek term 'dēmokratia" - simply because their is no Arabic term for self rule - not a cut - just saying) 

Young people in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the dreaded dictators. And in Libya, there is the thrill of liberty, delivered, in part, by Western powers. In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life.

America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. She wasn't brilliant at everything She attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the harvest of their own history. 

Now their world is what they make of it.

Pic - "The Foreigners Gift"