Perpetual Victimhood

Melanie Phillips comments on the Ahmadinejad speech:

Of course, the fact that the Jews did not come from ‘far away’ but were a nation in Israel long before Islam was even invented, and retained an unbroken link with and residency in that country through waves of successive invasions and colonisations — notably by the aggressive Islamic world — is utterly denied. The fact that Israel palpably has only ever wanted its own self to exist and has never had aggressive designs on any other country is also denied. Instead, the mad logic of fanatical victim complex means that Israel must be destroyed, and the jihadi tells himself that the destruction of the west in turn is likewise an act of self-defence.

[Emphasis mine]

She hits the nail on the head with that one. Every Islamic country cultivates that victim complex to some degree. The end result is of most Muslims hating and loathing the West instead of emulating it.

Now, you might think, "but by reading a little history, we can easily see that Muslims are not the victims of the West." True. However, you forget that Muslim nations don't teach real history. The times when Muslims ruled members of other religions with ruthlessness -- for example, the Mughals atrocities in the Asian subcontinent -- are simply airbrushed.

When members of other religions were the true victims of evil -- the Armenians in Turkey during 1915-18 and the Jews under the Nazis -- the history is simply ignored. In Islamic countries, the point of history is not to acquire knowledge or learn from the past but to pervertedly show that Muslims and only Muslims are the victims in this world.

Even in Saudi Arabia, the simple case of the First Gulf War is twisted into a war with which the US, and by extension the West, almost bankrupted the gullible Saudis (by charging them for the falsely heavy costs of the war). The conspiracy theory is basically that the US made money from both sides during the Gulf War by selling Saddam all his weapons and then leaving Kuwait and Saudi Arabia with the bill for fighting Saddam. So, a clear-cut case of helping Arabs is turned into a scheme for taking advantage of the Muslims.

Melanie is right to call this complex "fanatical."