Speaking the truth in the Middle East

An interesting exchange.  A forthright and brave Arab woman.

I don’t agree with everything here.

Shams Bandar — that’s her name — is a Saudi/Kuwaiti singer.  In this interview, she’s somewhat mischaracterizing and oversimplifying 1400 years of Islamic history, for instance, and contrasting it too starkly with much of Europe’s history over the same period.  The West hasn’t always been that good.

And the interviewer’s notion that it’s the West that has caused all of the Middle East’s problems is pure, historically uninformed fantasy.  The West isn’t that evil, or that powerful.

Moreover, this persistent urge to blame everything that’s wrong on outside agents is one of the major causes of the current dysfunctions in the region.  Alcoholics Anonymous teaches a useful lesson here:  If you don’t recognize your own role in creating your problems, you’ll probably never be able to solve those problems.

But this is really worth watching.  It’s less than three minutes long:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIQywBy2BxY

Thanks to Charles Steinman for bringing it to my attention.