Everything in the Middle East Means the Opposite

Even as Islamic Jihadists are taking over Syria, ethnically cleansing Kurds and terrorizing Christians, the media is hailing the new “inclusive” regime which “liberated” Syria.

The regime is indeed inclusive if you consider bearded men with assault rifles to be the measure of inclusivity. And terrorizing minorities to be the exciting new diversity.

“This victory, my brothers, is a victory for the entire Islamic nation,” Abu Mohammad al-Jawlani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former Al Qaeda and ISIS allied group, declared in the Umayyad Mosque. The mosque is a symbol of the old Caliphate and it echoed the speech given by his old friend, the former ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri declaring his own caliphate. But it will no doubt be a most inclusive caliphate.

As Jawlani had previously said, “some people limit the issue of implementing the rule of the sharia to just imposing some of the Hudud punishments, chopping off hands, stoning whomever, whipping someone who drinks alcohol, and so on. But this is a very basic part of the very big concept of implementing the rule of the sharia.” There’s a lot more to Sharia Islamic law than just chopping off hands but you have to work on the basics of hand chopping before going big.

Syria’s newly appointed Prime Minister Mohammad al-Bashir appeared in front of a white Jihadist flag with the Islamic declaration that rejects all other religions except Islam. Bashir’s credentials include a degree in Sharia Islamic law and membership in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Syrian Salvation Government’. After saving Syria from Assad, who will save it from the saviors?

Secretary of State Blinken is going on a tour to persuade the Turks and their Jihadis to establish an “inclusive” government in Syria. But inclusivity now means Sunni Jihadis backed by Turkey repressing and killing everyone else. This will be a fundamental liberating change from the old order in which Shiite Jihadis backed by Iran repressed and killed everyone else.

Words in the Middle East however have a way of meaning different things than they do over here. It’s not just “inclusive” that has a whole other dictionary entry.

Turkey bombing and displacing Kurds in Syria is considered “inclusivity”, but Israel bombing Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon is termed “genocide”.

The Islamist regime in Turkey, which has maintained an actual occupation of popular areas in Syria, before using proxies to seize the entire country, has accused Israel of “occupation” for expanding a security zone that it used to hold on an uninhabited mountain over 9,000 feet up.

The only possible victims of this ‘occupation’ might be the goats in the region who will likely appreciate and personally benefit from this long overdue ‘change of management’.

‘Occupation’ was a term widely used to describe Israel’s lack of presence in Gaza from which it had withdrawn back in 2005. But the simple fact that Israel was not in Gaza did not dissuade activists, journalists and the UN from accusing Israel of occupying land it wasn’t even on.

But ‘occupation’, like ‘inclusivity’, means the opposite of what it does in the Middle East.

Another popular accusation was that Israel was conducting a ‘siege’ of Gaza by refusing to let Hamas terrorists through its borders to kill and rape their way across Israel. By that definition any border with an enemy nation is a ‘siege’ and by locking your own door at night you’re besieging all the people outside who might want to break into your house.

“Genocide” is another of those many words that have different meanings in the New Middle East Dictionary. Amnesty International has come under fire for changing the definition of “genocide” in order to be able to accuse Israel of it.

Amnesty’s report is headlined, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”. If you feel like it’s genocide, well then it’s genocide. Amnesty decided that its definition of genocide should not use the traditional definition of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” because, as it explained on Page 101 of its report, it “considers this an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict.”

War becomes genocide. But only in the case of Israel. Meanwhile actual genocidal efforts by Hamas on Oct 7 and Turkey in Syria to target ethnic groups are redefined as “liberation”.

Probably inclusive liberation.

Gaza’s population actually grew which makes it a very unique form of genocide indeed. But after a year of claiming that there was no food in Gaza (despite social media videos of the Arab Muslim population stuffing itself during its annual Islamic festivities), “starvation” was also redefined. So was ‘famine’ which is defined as 2 per 1,000 people dying of heart attacks.

Over 1 million tons of food have entered Gaza since Oct 7. That’s half a ton for every terrorist supporter. Half a ton of food for every man, woman and children is to ‘starvation’ as population growth is to ‘genocide’ and as Jihad is to an ‘inclusive’ government in Syria.

But the New Middle East Dictionary has plenty of room for lots of Newspeak revisions.

The Arab Spring redefined Islamist takeovers as “democracy movements”. Egyptian Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid of Qatar’s Brookings Institute, recently charged that, “the U.S. has actively undermined democratic movements in the Arab world for decades — one of the great moral stains on America.” By democratic movements, he means the Muslim Brotherhood. And democracy then becomes Islamic theocracy and political terror.

But probably inclusive theocracy and political terror.

Arabic is written from right to left and sometimes things mean the opposite of what they do, but the problem is that we’ve adopted the Middle Eastern habit of dealing with the region by making words mean the opposite. When our political elites call genocide ‘liberation’ and liberation ‘genocide’, when they stigmatize any resistance to Islamic terror while calling terror ‘inclusive’, they’re not only reversing the moral polarities of our foreign policy, but killing the truth.

And making it impossible to understand what is really going on in the Middle East.

Initially we changed the definitions of words to fool the terrorists only to end up fooling ourselves. Efforts to avoid calling ISIS the “Islamic State” and to redefine Islamic terrorism as “violent extremism” or worse still “man-caused disasters” didn’t end up dissuading any Muslims from joining ISIS (whose I’s don’t stand for ‘inclusive’) and didn’t make us any safer.

The entire narrative of ‘radicalization’ tried to gate off some forms of Islam as legitimate and others as illegitimate as if there were an Islam out there that didn’t follow the same Koran. Under Obama, a “countering violent extremism” program was deployed to convince Muslims that Islamic terrorism of the kind practiced beginning with Mohammed was ‘un-Islamic’.

We didn’t fool any Muslims but we did fool ourselves. In 2024, all Islam is good. It’s inclusive. Especially when its bearded thugs are inclusively chopping off someone’s hands. And any resistance to it is bad. When Muslim Jihadis commit genocide, it becomes liberation. And when anyone fights back against them, it’s genocide. If they kill terrorists, it’s a war crime, and if they don’t kill them, it’s famine, siege and starvation no matter how fat the starving terrorists get.

Redefinition makes everything in the Middle East factually opposite to make it morally opposite.

The common paraphrase of Burke is wrong. All that is required for the triumph of evil is not for good men to do nothing, but for them to believe that evil is good and therefore good is evil.

Making everything morally opposite is truly all that is required for the triumph of evil.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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