Why do Arabs chop off hands? The short answer to the question is that they suffer from a chronic plague of theft, a perennial social disease in their culture. The hand-chopping is an effort to limit the behavior. Not only is there no conscience in the culture to suppress the urge to steal, but there is even admiration for the thief who gets away with his crime. That admiration goes to the very roots of Islam.
In 1939, a year judged by cineasts to be Hollywood’s greatest year ever, one film was The Thief of Baghdad with its state-of-the-art special effects and a story drawn from A Thousand and One Nights, whose title character is a winsome little street thief played by the Indian actor Sabu. Folklorists are familiar with such folk tales, in many cultures, of the rascal, the trickster.
But no less normative in Araby is the despot stealing the wealth of the people he dominates. Commonly, when his people have had enough of his abuse and rise up, as we recently saw when Syria’s Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus, he takes all the wealth that he had looted. In 2011’s Arab Spring, Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was reported to have fled the country with truckloads of gold bullion. And after Israel assassinated Hamas kingpin Isma’il Haniyeh, last year, we learned that he had become a billionaire.
PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.
Jesus Christ is King
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