I agree. The very zealousness with which so many Arab elites (though not all) have adopted these Western excuses for their dysfunction is the most powerful signal of their weakness. But it’s not the fault of Western academia. Arab elites have agency here. It was Arab intellectuals who went hungrily in search of anything and everything that could excuse their political dysfunctions, even at the cost of perpetuating them. At the risk of Israelis patting ourselves on the back a bit too much, I can’t help reading Hussain’s tweet and wondering if at some basic level, maybe the inexplicable power gap between a small Jewish population and vast Arab ones in the Middle East is a perfectly predictable gap in outcomes between a political culture that won’t fix itself because it is addicted to ideological excuses and a political culture that was never given that option — Arab-world Jews, for example, never got to claim they were “colonized” even when they were being violently oppressed and expelled — and so was forced to accomplish unreasonably huge things. https://bird.makeup/@hahussain/1820789819712167997
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