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...In Fisks description, bin Laden was attended by bearded, taciturn figures who never strayed more than a few yards from him. In Lawrences account, Feisal was accompanied by a retinue of slaves who guarded his person and lit his path with lamps. Students of British imperial adventure novels will recognize the genre. The world the writers conjure up is pre-modern, where natural aristocrats, tall and slender, lord over male servants and slaves who are handsome, silent, and strong. The aristocrats are famous for their warrior skills. Their long robes are trimmed with gold and scarlet. They carry daggers in their belts. It is a world without women and it reeks of homoeroticism.
In conjuring up this imagery, Fisk was doing the same as the many European writers who have been drawn to the Arab world over the past two centuries. In his book Muslim Society, the late Ernest Gellner analyzed the nature of the appeal of this pre-modern, feudal order. Gellner wrote:
The European discovery and exploration of Muslim tribal society occurred in the main after the French Revolution, and was often carried out by menlong before T. E. Lawrencewho were possessed by a nostalgia for a Europe as it was, prior to the diffusion of the egalitarian ideal . They sought not the noble savage, but the savage noble.
This same hankering after the trappings of aristocracy, or anything that smacks of aristocracy, is behind much of the anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment that now emanates from the European news media, especially in the writings of European leftists such as Fisk.
The aristocratic disdain for American society goes back more than two hundred years. It originated in the presumption that none of Europes cast-offs would ever amount to anything great. Even Alexis de Tocquevilles otherwise illuminating work Democracy in America stated that only a society based on privilege, never an egalitarian democracy, could produce a great culture. Indeed, all the settler societies of the New World were saddled with the same condescending presumption: no greatness without an aristocracy. It is heavily ironic that leftist authors like Robert Fisk, who imagine themselves the ideological heirs of the French Revolution, now speak more for the world view of the ancien régime.
Similarly, despite the remarkable artistic accomplishments of the Jews throughout Western history, the fact that their own societies contained no aristocrats puts them in almost the same boat as the uncouth settlers of the New World. This also accounts for much of the current European cultural and political elites prejudice against Israel and support for the Arabs.
This prejudice is more than political ideology and more than envy of Americas wealth and power, although that is obviously a big part of it. It is a deeply embedded cultural trait that affects the way its adherents actually perceive the world.
When journalists like Fisk look at terrorists like bin Laden, they do not see people who disgrace themselves and their religion with cowardly acts of terrorism against civilian men, women, and children. Instead, they see freedom fighters. During the American invasion of Iraq in April 2003, at the same time as television viewers were watching the American army reach the outskirts of Baghdad and capture the airport, Fisk was in a bus with other journalists inside the city. On April 8 he filed a report worthy of the former Iraqi information minister himself. Fisk said:
The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles . How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 198088 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this....
