A couple of months ago, after the golden domed Al Askari Mosque in Samarra had been attacked, I was asked by a friend why Muslims blamed the United States and Israel for this bombing. The Iranian president, his leashed Lebanese poodle Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and a few other folks issued statements and articles accusing the US of wishing to stir up sectarian tensions among the Iraqis. For instance, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the following in reaction to the tragedy:

???????These heinous acts are committed by a group of Zionists and occupiers that have failed. They have failed in the face of Islam????????s logic and justice,???????

This is true in the minds of some for almost everything. To answer my friend’s question, I have come to the conclusion that individuals such as Mr. Ahmadinejad suffer from a mental disorder. A lot of Middle Easterners have what I call Type I Americo-Zionist Syndrome (or AZS), which results in random, and practically uncontrolable outbursts of “Zionists did it!” or “America’s fault!”, even when the fault for whatever calamity lays squarely at the feet of Muslim Middle Easterners. Those with Type I AZS will also accuse those who differ in opinion from them of being part of a conspiracy, or of being “Zionists,” “American proxies,” in more recent times, “neo-cons,” in years past, “shoubi,” or outrightly of being “Jewish”. AZS does not only apply to Americans or Zionists, it may apply to any factor that the afflicted chose to blame for their woes, as one often reads of a “Zino-Persian Conspiracy” in the writings of Baéathists and Iraqi nationalists during the Cold War, or of inter-sectarian suspicions in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, or the Gulf. The name of the Syndrome comes from the primary object of blame.

Another result of the AZS condition is a limited loss of vision and hearing. I call this Type II AZS. The afflicted are not able to see or hear negative about the pernicious actions of Middle Easterners or Muslims (especially Palestinians or Iraqi insurgents). The Big Pharaoh described this today, using the example of one of the largest AZS colonies: Al Jazeera. He recently appeared on a BBC radio program with the chief editor of that unique channel, Mr. Ahmed el Sheikh. Though Big Pharaoh was not able to articulate all his points on the air, he has described a clear case of Collective Type II AZS (AZS in any form shared by a certain grouping of individuals such as a social clique, newspaper, TV station, office, faculty, or the like).

Mr. Ahmed, with all my respect, Al Jazeera doesn’t treat all news events equally. Let me give you an example. You defended the channel????????s use of the word ???????massacre??????? to describe the Gaza beach bombing. I don????????t have a problem with that. However, has Al Jazeera used the same terminology when referring to the daily terrorist attacks in Iraq? The answer is a definite no. Take last May????????s market bombing where over 25 people were blow up by one of Zarqawi????????s suicide bombers. Did Al Jazeera play footage of the carnage over and over and over again. No it didn????????t. Did it run sensational and emotionally crushing programs one after the other? No it didn????????t. Did Sheikh Qaradawi, Al Jazeera????????s ???????spiritual mentor???????, appear on his show and really concentrate on this incident? No he didn????????t. Does Al Jazeera treat an Iraqi family that was wiped out by Zarqawi the same way it treated the Gaza beach family? No it does not. Please note that I am only talking about Iraq here, Darfur is another similar case.

Mr. Sheikh seems to have a mixture of both Type I and Type II AZS. Big Pharaoh describes his random outbursts:

It seems Mr. Ahmed El Sheikh thought he was on an Al Jazeera program when he abruptly interrupted me by the words “you don’t watch Al Jazeera, he doesn’t watch Al Jazeera,” when I said that the channel doesn’t show what he said it shows. Well, Mr. Ahmed, I didn’t know you had a hidden camera in my living room, and in case you do, I am afraid to tell you that something must have gone wrong with it because I do watch your channel.

A clear victim of AZS.

Another example comes from a recent Rayyan al-Shawaf piece in the Daily Star. Al-Shawaf describes the “deep hypocrisy” in the way the Arab media choses which “massacres” to cover, and in the way that many Arab societies decide what constitutes a massacre.

What al-Shawaf describes is nothing less than a case of Societal AZS. Societal AZS is a form of collective AZS taken to the next level. It is institutionalized by way of government bodies or laws, reaching the point where AZS is the norm throughout society with few exceptions. It spreads by way of what essentially amounts to peer pressure: the symptomes of AZS are taken to be “normal,” and are identified with patriotism, nationalism, defense of the homeland, culture or religion, and even masculinity.

Take for instance al-Shawaf’s description of the often selective Lebanese national (and often Western acedemic or journalistic) memory with regards to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).

The Lebanese have long been familiar with Ä. . .Å duplicity, which in their country manifests itself in the selective commemoration of Civil War-era massacres. For years, convention has dictated that the only crimes afforded official recognition should be those committed by, or involving, Israel. The most notorious of these was the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians in September 1982. But this approach is selective.

Ä. . .Å

To begin with, massacres committed by Palestinian militias (Damour, Chekka, and others) have been all but forgotten; the Lebanese Christian victims of these outrages are alone in commemorating them. But there is another twist to the macabre legacy of Civil War crimes, for even those massacres in which Palestinians fell victim to Christian militias (Karantina, Tell al-Zaatar) have been deliberately ignored in favor of focusing all attention on Sabra and Shatila. As if that weren’t hypocritical enough, the principal Lebanese role in the slaughter has been officially overlooked, while the involvement of the Israelis, who were surely facilitators, has been made to appear central.

But do not think that this only goes one way. It applies to Lebanese violence against Palestinians as well in some cases, as

Palestinian suffering at the hands of other Lebanese groups has similarly been relegated to obscurity. During the “war of the camps” between Shiite and Palestinian militias in the mid-1980s, the Amal movement laid waste to several Palestinian refugee camps. This is no longer mentioned, and hasn’t prevented Amal representatives from turning up at commemorations for the victims of the Sabra and Shatila killings.

Al-Shawaf descibes a similar tendency during the 1991 Gulf War and today in Iraq.

In many parts of the Middle East, AZS runs deep. It often seems hereditary. Be not fooled though, for the cycle can be broken! This disorder is learned, that it is it is not inborn nor genetic.

Those most affected by it tend to have suffered great trauma in their lifetimes, often at the hands of the United States (directly or indirectly, for instance living under a repressive US backed regime an being abused by that regime; or living in a nation occupied or defeated in combat by the United States), Israel (as was the case of Hassan Nasrallah, the current Secretary General of the Lebanese Hezb Allah, who lived during the Lebanese Civil War and lost a son to the IDF), or some other entity. These are called Trauma Induced AZS cases, as their AZS is the direct result of trauma caused, in some form or another, by a foreign or internal power that is now the object of their AZS. Political leaders, especially those like the Syrian Bouthaina Shaaban, often suffer from Trauma Induced AZS, not because of battlefield experience with their “Zionist Enemy,” but rather from being constantly at odds with the Jewish state and its allies. Being involved in military, political, or economic competition with an enemy often results in Trauma Induced AZS.

In other cases those suffering from AZS have adopted “pan-X” ideologies, that is, political viewpoints that tie them to the causes of other peoples who share common traits with them, but are not in immediate political, geographic or economic proximity to them. In the Middle East the most historically prevelent examples of “pan-X” ideologies would be pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. Others include pan-Syrianism, pan-Iranism, and Berberism. These ideas place the individual into a new, broad and often vague community, allowing the individual to take the suffering of one group in an often far off land as his own. This is quite different from mere sympathy. It is the outright and near total identification of the self with another self. This means then that when, say, an Arab in Palestine is killed by an IDF trooper, his death is humiliating not just for his family and the Palestinian people, but also for Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians and Yemenis.

These pan-X movements usually call for some sort of unity, most often of the geo-political nature. E.g., all Arab, Islamic or Iranic regions are to become one. This becomes the individual’s struggle. When practicality or the selfishness of the members of the pan-nation reveal that this dream will not be realized, the individual, after much blood, sweat, and tears in search of this goal, snaps. His dream’s failure is not his fault or the fault of his fragile ideology, but rather the fault of foreign or internal spies and conspirators. Zionists. Persians. Shoubiun. Kurds. Arabs. The British. America. Israel. The West. Pornography. Berbers. And so on. All things negative become the fault of the Other. America destroyed the mosque. Because well, that’s just their prerogative. Or so the thinking goes.

The Snapped then passes this paranoia on to his children, warning them of those dirty Kurds, scheming Jews, Zionist Persians or bellicose Arabs. The youth then learn and are afflicted with AZS in a way similar to their parents, through propaganda or political indoctrination. This variety is called Stress Induced AZS, as it results from the stress of ideological, political, social, etc. failure. Stress Induced AZS is usually felt at the popular level (or in a mixture of the governmental level in areas where a conflict is not within immediate proximity, such as Libya, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iran, etc.), while Trauma Induced AZS is usually felt at the governmental level (or at the popular level when in areas such as Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, etc.). These situations are not exclusive and do over lap.

How to remedy this? The simple prescription is to limit the amount of trauma that people in places such as Palestine, and Iraq have to endure. The less trauma from America, Israel or elsewhere a people must endure, the less likely it is that they will be affected by AZS. Conversely, the more these peoples are exposed to such trauma, the more likely they are to be affected by AZS. This does not mean that the US ought to leave Iraq to alleviate Iraqi suffering. That would exasperate the plight of that country’s people. It does however mean that the US ought to soften its presence and aid the development of a stable regime there. It is difficult to come up with a conflict resolution strategy for the Middle East within a few paragraphs so I will the cure for Trauma Induced AZS up for debate. In short hand, it may be said that the best cure for it is to not start conflicts needlessly.

As to a cure for Stress Induced AZS, the best solution is development of strong, yet non-chauvinist national identities in Middle Eastern countries, stable economic structures and non-militant varieties of religion. Through all of this, the region will gain confidence in itself. It will be able to cope with its mistakes and states and peoples in the region will be able to deal with one another as if they are each legitimate and equal. As of current, the Arab states and Iran lack the nation confidence that Israel and Turkey have. This handicaps them, as they are doomed to the fate of constant paranoia, which makes them feel as if they are constantly under attack by often invisible and imaginary foes. They thus feel the need to prove their validity as nations and strut their stuff militarily and political (whitness Iran’s flexing in the Straight of Harmouz recently and Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric). They feel that they have to proove themselves. Israel and Turkey do not. They are content to deal with their own affairs in a mature way, not until they show someone else who is boss. Which makes sense, in the mind of one with AZS. These states allow others to control their policy other than their own rationale, by listening to imaginary voices or fighting in the dark. They embolden their enemies in their zealousness. It is not surprising that the Arab states with the most solid sense of legitimacy, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and the UAE, for example, are the ones making the greatest strides, while those with weak sources of legitimacy, among their leaders and statehood (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, etc.), are most stagnant culturally, politically and economically. Confidence is the cure.