While we might agree with the comment by deceased writer John Fowle: “Everyone falls over themselves to avoid the truth: that most Muslims are very primitive people and can't be treated as sophisticated ones. If you endlessly prod a tiger, of course its claws will flash out” . It’s a case of never mind the inconsistency, we are as curious as we are appalled about their funny ways and beliefs, not least their love of martyrdom. Let the positive discrimination flow.

Actually, no it’s not. Though we do have images embedded in our mind such as Sufist rave-ups and Fez hats, the attitude towards the Maghreb and Arabia is only really a little to do with sub-Said ideas. It is more pertinently connected to plain old socialist opposition to (western-sponsored) dictators and a concern for “the Arab street” (or the Israeli one: cf, the support for a more traditional Labor party). There is disgust and wonder at how long the policies of containment (Palestine), terror (Riyadh v the terrorists), totalitarianism (Damascus, Tehran, Cairo, etc) can last. There is disgust and wonder at US blind eyes to what’s going on in Sudan and elsewhere.

But why doesn’t this concern radiate more fairly to other areas, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America (get out, that’s our backyard), Central Asia? For European minds in particular, the Middle East and North Africa is naturally the focus for these attitudes. Because it is the region nearest in our mind’s-eye map of the world, and there has always been more of a symbiotic relationship with here than in other areas – the UK and the subcontinent excepted. Here the US State Department term for the area, the Near East (it even used to include Greece), is much more instructive, as it is truer to the European position, the Arab world as the nearest exotic other, offering a culture both intoxicating and confusing. Countless writers get lost trying to find the essence of that mythical Arab street – look at William Dalrymple’s recent progs – like there is some mystical geometry connecting everywhere from Marrakech to Muscat. Because the lot of Mohammed the run-of the-mill Arab Muslim is still a post-imperial problem (ie, the hiving off of Lebanon from Syria; division of the ‘Transjordan’, the Balfour declaration, the old battles with the Ottoman Caliphate, the creation of Kuwait). Because people are inexorably drawn to what they see as the mystical cradle of civilisation – Jerusalem, Sinai, Surelands.

And because, of course, these problems have now been brought to home. Not content with exporting social exclusion, France, the UK, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and others practised it in their own countries with Arab/Muslim immigrants and are now experiencing the effects. And obviously in a segregated world it has been much easier to propagate extremist attitudes, like the bombers of 7/7, the Brixton mosque, etc. It also makes selective immigration to solve skills shortages and the inconvenient wage demands of pampered indigenous Western workers who have been deceived into thinking that working their arses off to no great productive effect is an obligation. See recent K-Punk-led rhizomes on work.

Let’s make it clear/not sound like Blair – the left are often guilty of racist exoticism. Try telling a wound-up Muslim bloke from Dewsbury that you don’t believe in 90-day detention without trial or charge because of the record of the US and UK governments in countries like Iraq and Iran down the years and you’d be rightly slapped across your indulgent mouth. A lot of middle-class socialists see massive conflagrations like we’re seeing now in the Middle East as vindication and catharsis – again self-serving and promoting. “If it wasn’t for Bush...” But it doesn’t mean they’re wrong just because they’re annoying or vain, or annoyingly vain; they’re just weak and tired. Perhaps.

“Once you’ve got people publicly agreeing with things they know in their hearts to be wrong, you’ve got them by the balls,” went one line in Sin City. This is very much the stage of control* we’re at in the west. Muslim Arabs in the Middle East may be familiar with totalitarianism but Western capitalism requires such homogeneity of spirit, aspiration and intent that some further slaughter in the name of democracy and in the pseudo-mythic defence against will be necessary.

Which flips us to the other side. It’s the neocons, their appeasers and the pro-bombing left who have been sucking deep on the shisha and chewing the khat while dreaming of the 72 Condies awaiting them once they have martyred their brains to the US project. Everybody knows that “bringing democracy to Iraq” is very much a minor factor compared with the bigger goal of securing a long-term source of oil supplies other than Saudi Arabia (the US institutes have long been talking contingency plans in case the people ever get the chance to steal the princes’ power). On Newsnight in mid-November was the perfect avatar of this approach. Douglas Murray, essentially promoting his book, also promoted the good of the Iraqi invasion and the “evidence” of Iran’s nuclear threat, but hardly rendered this course better by his tone of blinkered, arrogant belligerence. A comment on the Newsnight homepage summed him up: “Murray arrogantly leans back in his chair, evading Paxman’s question about how we can avoid the politicisation of intelligence reports. 'I'm asking if you have any bright ideas on how to prevent this problem?'" Why are these hackademics even given airtime?

The right are actually fascinated with the Arab world too, with a fervent desire to turn every last point on the axis of evil into a Dubai-alike service centre for all your kapital needs (prostitution, illegal goods, drugs, sshh!). Every outpost of tyranny will bear the sign of commerce. The ethos of ‘competition’ is an insidious one and has corrupted political debate to a domestic level – ‘listen to me – I have the answers’ (au Murray). Nowhere is this more evident than in the US belief that it alone, because it is economically the most powerful nation, has found the secret to harmonious living through the unfettered operation of the marketplace. Note also Bush’s telling syllogisms about “stopping exporting terror” and “starting importing democracy” – strategy as commerce. Its de facto ‘victory’ in the cold war has legitimised this belief in innate superiority that, in the mouth of its best propagandists, transcends races and religions and depends only on your ability to selectively employ critical thinking and to put national interest above every other consideration. The fact that any of the three ancient religions can be central to the belief of US hegemony proves nothing other than the essential elasticity of meaning when pushing an afterlife – the ultimate narcotic.

As Lenin has recently been remarking, appeasers of the imperium are continually losing credibility, and their lines of attack are becoming ever wearier. In their recognition of the elephant of justification, they make sure to execute half-arsed googles on t’internet by way of corroboration for their barmy advocacy. Brocke’s mauling of Chomsky has been itself debunked. “Without Prejudice” columnist Nick Cohen was recently in a tiss about how Europe – where some remnants of socialist thinking still reside even in the legislature – ignored the situation in Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre. But the sloppy so and so forgot to mention how their relegation of the matter to “any other business” would almost certainly be dictated by American interests in the region.

And over at the disconcertingly-named Social Affairs Unit, Murray kicks off a comment about Holland’s problems with an odious conflation (self-consciously short of a straight lie), painting Dutch society as embattled against hardline Islamists following Theo van Gogh’s murder (“the second killing of an outspoken critic of Islam”). “No one wants to be the next Pim Fortuyn or Van Gogh.” Pompous horseshit. Fortuyn’s murderer, Volkert van der Graaf, may have claimed to be “protecting Muslims” from Fortuyn’s right-wing scapegoating, but psychologists have pronounced him ‘sane but with severe personality disorder’. They’re obviously as confused as he and everybody else is.

Cull can do selective myopia too – that “Free Radical” Norman Johnson, part of the new think in the Berliner Guardian – is an ABSOLUTE CUNT. (Though some doubt whether he is even real; either way he’s a sad joke). We are a website and therefore more of a medium of opinion – we are not necessarily bound by the same “standards” of journalism as the broadsheet opinion formers (you know, like Judith Miller), so we don’t have to explain this.

Clearly the right-wing apologists are being plagued by some potent djinns to arrive at these ridiculous strategies for war. Ultimately, and to disappoint the neocons and the pro-bombing left and any other appeasers of illegal policies, the left’s views regarding the Middle East have about 4.2 per cent to do with Orientalism, -12 per cent to do with a fondness for keeping Baathist terror alive and 622 per cent to do with socio-economic concerns and political realities, which, yes, includes the effect of (Western-backed) dictatorships on “the Arab street” but does not extend to illegal wars, justified by one reason but serving latent interests, to get rid of their former allies. They may follow a beguiling faith but that that doesn’t justify repression, lack of representation and substandard living conditions – Bush’s “democratisation” mantras have no material effect on the people at all. The instinctive reaction of doubt and mistrust toward the US government is the natural one and the only possible one given a brief and objective appreciation of their record and stated aims at present and down the years.

*{Now that politicians in the West are ceding their responsibility for formulating policy to improve the existence of their constituents, at least, to the media, we can see that the next stage of US Imperialism has been achieved.)