The rising tide of irrationality and conflict of cultures drum beating (on both sides) saddens and disappoints me. The Western side more so, largely because the Western side represents at the State and lesser extent non-State actors level, more powerful and coherent entities. Or without jargon - the US, the UK, EU - whatever their flaws are more capable of actually getting things done than most MENA region actors. To have public discourse in the West on Islam become more and more poisoned by speech that sounds disturbingly like (which is to say precisely the same, with but a word change here and there) the anti-Catholic hate speech my own dear Protestant ancestors (right up to very recent times) engaged in, disturbs. One gets the sense lessons are never learned....

But then I should not be surprised, as a good amateur student of history with I think a fine sense of the historical and historiography.

In many ways, I am almost led to despair. After something over a decade in and around the MENA region, in private endeavours and profit-making, the MENA region has become rather second nature. Certainly speaking the language had its utility, and now I find .... peculiar the fun house mirror image that obtains in the West, most particularly in the US but also Europe.

At the same time, of course, it is senseless to whitewash a similar fun-house mirror image prevalent in the MENA region (generally, of a grasping, manipulative, anti-Islamic West always dicking the ordinary Mohammed and Fatima out of a good life: whatever the distorted basis in fact - certainly the colonial period laid a factual foundation for post-colonial delusions and excuse-making). No end of tedious conversations refuting assertions that my presence and work over the years was not in the service of Mossad/CIA/MI-56.

The political machinations supposed, the conspiracy theories proposed in large part are merely tedious - and frankly not that extraordinary given the idiotic things one hears from better educated people in the West about petrol prices. Indeed, given real (although far less skilled and dramatic than the Hollywoodesque conspiracy theories) mucking around of US, UK, French and Russian intel and diplos bribery, one can at least give the secular conspiracy theories a nod for expressing some kernel of truth about the powerlessness and disenfranchisement of the average Fatima and Mohammed, and the whorish behaviour of the vampiric regional governments altenratively selling stability to the West and resistance to the population.

Rather more unfortunate and dangerous is the underlying sense of cultural disrespect - the sense the core of most MENA region residents' personal identity, as Muslims, is fundamentally disliked, despised, even hated.

Sadly I think that the bloody minded Takfiri murderers represented by al Qaeda, with their blood drenched Salafism and burning desire to alienate Muslims from all non-Muslims, have succeeded in seeing some important steps forward in their project of alienation, and the sensation of disrespect has real roots.

The saddest part I find, and here I again come back to my phrase, "The Pious Middle" is my profound sensation that the Pious Middle can live quite well with the West - if it is given a bone or two with respects to building up cultural self confidence - and if on the side of the West a bit of historical knowledge is dredged up to recall that the much vaunted "secularity" of the West is a very recent thing indeed, and that "Pious Middles" (Christian Democratic movements) were very important in helping develop civil society.

However, on the part of many commentators, such as Andrew Sullivan as an example (Sullivan capturing for me the sincere phobic - a fellow with his heart in the right place, not a bigot, but rather afeared by the strange foreigners and prone to overreacting), the standard of Muslim moderation with which they think the West can engage is nothing approaching a reasonable Pious Middle but rather either the alienated secular elites who mouth convenient pieties and have all the reforming instincts of Cathereine the Great, or of outright apostates - as again the Pious must mean wild eyed Salafi-Takfiri murderers. Just like the Takfiris want.

This kind of discourse and posturing is nothing but a dialogue des sourdes.

Depressing, irritating and self-destructive. As well as unnecessary.

Well, there it is, frustration and saying the same thing over and over but less coherently. Blame it on my narcotics.