Daniel Greenfield
This is interesting because the divide between
the Muslim world and the Asian sphere goes right to the heart of the
chaos spilling out of the region.
The non-Muslim countries of Asia have been getting their act together
while the Muslim countries have been Islamizing and taking large chunks
of Saudi money.
There is no telling where Indonesia might be today without the
influence of Islam. And Pakistan might be closer to India, instead of a
horrid backward place that murders women for minor offenses and invests
money in terrorism and nuclear weapons.
North Korea is an aberration only by Asian standards. By Muslim standards it’s the norm.
And so this Gatestone piece is of some interest.
The Chinese, at behind-the-scenes conferences and
discussions during the past few months, kept saying they were perplexed
about the Muslim world’s – particularly the Arab world’s – inability to
deal with the modern world. The Chinese and the Muslims, they repeated,
had suffered the same humiliation and occupation by foreigners over the
past two hundred years, but the Chinese and Muslim reactions to these
experiences seem so completely different.
“We also suffered,” the Chinese said, “but now we control our
destiny, and are doing everything we can to learn from these foreigners
so that we can benefit from the modern world and ensure that we do not
suffer this humiliation again. We Chinese ‘look to the future.’”
The Muslims, on the other hand, the Chinese stated, seem to have a
different approach: Instead of looking to the future, they “are mired in
the past,” more concerned about taking revenge against those foreigners
whom they believe had humiliated and oppressed them.
It was because of this focus on the past, these Chinese intellectuals
and leaders stated, that Arabs and Muslims were therefore unable to
build societies which could participate in the modern world. “Revenge
and victimhood,” these Chinese argued, could permanently cause “the
Arabs and Muslim world” to “remain behind the West and Asia.”
China, which is largely secular, despite a sizable number of Muslims,
has trouble understanding the intersection between religious and
national imperatives.
The Muslim world doesn’t really consist of nations, but of a motley
collection of tribes, ethnicities and linguistic groups tied together by
the Islamic expansionist mandate.
The expansionist mandate of Islam ties Islamic identity to conquest.
Revenge and Victimhood is the whole point. China can function as a
country without Korea, even though it might like to do that one day.
However China does need to take Taiwan and Hong Kong to retain its
Chinese identity.
But for Islam, their Taiwan is the entire world. Islam must rule over
non-Muslims and expand its dominions or it loses touch with its Islamic
identity and its sense of destiny that gives it momentum.
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The first-order sufferers will be small businessmen (mostly Russian) and upper-middle Cypriots and foreign residents with their money in Cypriot banks. But the whole region will take a longer-term blow from the loss of Cyprus as a place for upstart businesses to park capital. Capital that can’t be parked cheaply in the EU won’t be invested in the EU – at least not by the smaller, less financially “connected” entrepreneurs who drive economic dynamism and growth.
The big Russian firms that bank with the Russian Commercial Bank in Cyprus have protection in the deal, although they will have more trouble moving capital around under the “capital controls” to be implemented, to keep depositors from draining their accounts. Russia has been relatively quiet and mild on the terms of the Cyprus deal, largely because the biggest Russian depositors in Cyprus bank with the RCB anyway, and won’t be hit with the 40% “amputation” tax on their accounts.