Tony Benn, former British Cabinet Minister

On Thursday, July 7th, former British Cabinet Minister Tony Benn referred to the plight of Palestinians as one factor behind the London terror bombings, which had occurred earlier that day. Benn may well have been right as there is never a shortage of justifications for such acts. The plight of the estimated 2 million African Muslims who were driven from their homes by Arab Muslims in West Sudan, with at least 50,000 killed, would never be cited as a cause. Neither would the rights of the people of Kurdistan, the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. From the time British cartographers split Kurdistan in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, between the four Muslim countries - Turkey, Iran Iraq and Syria - the Kurds were treated very badly. The lot of Iraqi Kurds has improved significantly since the US imposed no-fly zone in the 1990's and following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Let's at least recognise good news.

However, bad news sells magazines as Irish journalist Vincent Browne appears to believe. He is Ireland's leading commentator on foreign issues and is a super example of the well-paid chairborne commentator on world affairs who has never lived abroad for an extended period or worked as a foreign correspondent. This week's issue of Browne's Village magazine has images of George W. Bush and Tony Blair on the cover with the words The Real Terrorists emblazoned across it. Browne seldom writes anything positive and the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism," coined by the former New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning columnist William Safire, when working as a speechwriter at the Nixon White House, comes to mind. Browne is generally anti-war. However he has in the past lamented the failure to stop genocide in Africa while he has both supported and opposed the American led NATO military action in the Balkans, in the 1990's.

Palestine

Yasser Arafat - winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 1994 - Arafat rejected a deal with Isreal that was brokered by US President Bill Clinton and subsequently supported terrorist attacks on Isreal

A decade ago, the prospects for peaceful settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute ended when extremists on both sides doomed the necessary compromises that were required for a long-term solution. Palestine lacked a leader like the 1920's Irish nationalist Michael Collins who saw virtue in compromise. In 1974 in Northern Ireland, both the IRA and pro-British extremists doomed the first cross-community power-sharing agreement. It took almost a quarter century for a new agreement that was similar to the 1974 one, to win cross-community support.

Who knows how long it will take for a viable state of Palestine to be established and for the excuse for Muslim extremists to be no longer available? As for the US invasion of Iraq, it has undoubtedly given heart to the jihadis. However, who knows what the verdict on the overthrow of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein will be in say ten years time? The end of Communist dictatorship in Europe unleashed ethnic tensions that had terrible consequences for some people in the former empire. There was also economic dislocation for other people. However, the verdict today can only be positive. In Iraq, a state of tyranny has been replaced with one of chaos but UN sanctions would have remained on Iraq for as long as Saddam retained power.

Failure in the Middle East

Despite the problems that exist in the world today, consider the situation in 1974. Not only was Eastern Europe controlled by a nuclear-powered dictatorship in Moscow, dictatorships ruled Spain, Portugal and Greece. It was a similar situation in Latin America and Asia. Today, it is only the Middle East and much of Africa that remains frozen in time.

Gamel Nasser, President of Egypt - Nasser dreamt of creating an Arab nation that might stretch from Morocco to Iraq. He merged his country with Syria in 1958 to form “the United Arab Republic.” Iraq also considered joining the union. The Syrians felt the Egyptians did not treat them as equals. After a 1961 drought in Syria, army officers seized control of the nation and declared independence from Egypt. Nassar kept the name United Arab Republic as a symbol for his hope of Arab unity. Nasser led the disastrous Arab war with Isreal in 1967.

In the Middle East, Israel has developed a modern economy and democracy in a desert region similar to that inhabited by the Arab peoples. Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek magazine has written: The question is how a region that once yearned for modernity could reject it so dramatically. In the Middle Ages the Arabs studied Aristotle (when he was long forgotten in the West) and invented algebra. In the 19th century, when the West set ashore in Arab lands, in the form of Napoleon's conquest of Egypt, the locals were fascinated by this powerful civilization. In fact, as the historian Albert Hourani has documented, the 19th century saw European-inspired liberal political and social thought flourish in the Middle East.

Zalaria writes of Egyptian President Nasser's promotion of Pan-Arabism in the 1950's and 1960's: It was a version of the nationalism that had united Italy and Germany in the 1870s--that those who spoke one language should be one nation. America thinks of modernity as all good--and it has been almost all good for America. But for the Arab world, modernity has been one failure after another. Each path followed--socialism, secularism, nationalism--has turned into a dead end. While other countries adjusted to their failures, Arab regimes got stuck in their ways. And those that reformed economically could not bring themselves to ease up politically. The Shah of Iran, the Middle Eastern ruler who tried to move his country into the modern era fastest, reaped the most violent reaction in the Iranian revolution of 1979. But even the shah's modernization--compared, for example, with the East Asian approach of hard work, investment and thrift--was an attempt to buy modernization with oil wealth.

Fareed Zakaria has served as editor of Newsweek International since 2001, overseeing Newsweek's eight editions throughout Asia, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. In 1992, at the age of 28, Zakaria became the youngest managing editor in the history of Foreign Affairs, America's leading foreign policy journal – a position he held through 2000.

It turns out that modernization takes more than strongmen and oil money. Importing foreign stuff--Cadillacs, Gulfstreams and McDonald's--is easy. Importing the inner stuffings of modern society--a free market, political parties, accountability and the rule of law--is difficult and dangerous. The Gulf states, for example, have gotten modernization lite, with the goods and even the workers imported from abroad. Nothing was homegrown; nothing is even now. As for politics, the Gulf governments offered their people a bargain: we will bribe you with wealth, but in return let us stay in power. It was the inverse slogan of the American revolution--no taxation, but no representation either....

Globalization in the Arab world is the critic's caricature of globalization--a slew of Western products and billboards with little else. For some in their societies it means more things to buy. For the regimes it is an unsettling, dangerous phenomenon. As a result, the people they rule can look at globalization but for the most part not touch it...Disoriented young men, with one foot in the old world and another in the new, now look for a purer, simpler alternative. Fundamentalism searches for such people everywhere; it, too, has been globalized. One can now find men in Indonesia who regard the Palestinian cause as their own. (Twenty years ago an Indonesian Muslim would barely have known where Palestine was.) Often they learned about this path away from the West while they were in the West. As did Mohamed Atta, the Hamburg-educated engineer who drove the first plane into the World Trade Center

Zakaria writes that globalization has caught the Arab world at a bad demographic moment. Arab societies are going through a massive youth bulge, with more than half of most countries' populations under the age of 25. Young men, often better educated than their parents, leave their traditional villages to find work. They arrive in noisy, crowded cities like Cairo, Beirut and Damascus or go to work in the oil states. (Almost 10 percent of Egypt's working population worked in the Gulf at one point.) In their new world they see great disparities of wealth and the disorienting effects of modernity; most unsettlingly, they see women, unveiled and in public places, taking buses, eating in cafes and working alongside them.

A huge influx of restless young men in any country is bad news. When accompanied by even small economic and social change, it usually produces a new politics of protest. In the past, societies in these circumstances have fallen prey to a search for revolutionary solutions. (France went through a youth bulge just before the French Revolution, as did Iran before its 1979 revolution.) In the case of the Arab world, this revolution has taken the form of an Islamic resurgence.

Blaming America for action and inaction

Many Europeans appear to only react to a foreign issue when there is an American angle to it. Sudan, Burma, North Korea and Zimbabwe evoke little response. Sometimes, America is both blamed for action and inaction.

In 1999, Vincent Browne's Irish Times colleague Kevin Myers wrote: Not so long ago Vincent Browne was feverishly denouncing the US in this newspaper for not intervening in Rwanda/Burundi to end the genocide there, and he quoted all manner of international law, most pointedly the Genocide Convention of 1949, as justification. Now journalists should not be too predictable, otherwise there'd be no point in anyone actually reading what they said. So maybe we shouldn't be too surprised that he is now feverishly denouncing the US for doing in Kosovo what he was urging it to do in Africa.

In 2001, Browne called the Americans  terrorists for knowingly inflicting terror on innocent people in Afghanistan. He said that the US should have avoided violence and the inevitable killing of innocent civilians at least until negotiation had failed. It did not exhaust negotiation on the extradition of bin Laden et al, indeed it did not negotiate at all.

Browne has not said how the US could have stopped the genocide of 1 million people in Africa without the risk of civilian casualties. In 1996, he wrote that the genocide there (in the Balkans) stopped only when the US and then the UN intervened militarily. Yet three years later, he was denouncing the US military response to the ethnic cleansing by Serbian soldiers in  the province of Kosovo.

Vincent Browne - In the small Irish media market, Browne works for three of the four principal Irish media organisations and also has his own political weekly

Browne wrote in 1999: How can the deliberate infliction of devastation wrought by bombs, on the lives of innocent people, ever be justified? The issue of America's force protection policy of using devastating force is a legitimate one to raise, but Browne cannot have it both ways in both praising NATO bombing in the Balkans in the 1990's and criticising it. It is an issue of credibility and consistency, which he today so virulently criticises others for not meeting this standard, from the safety of his PC.

Finally, in 2002 Charles Latvis, an American resident in Ireland, wrote the following in a letter to The Irish Times:

Hypocrisy and inconsistency are the two charges which have been levelled most loudly and repetitively at America, but surely our esteemed journalists know these are weapons which almost always leave a powder stain. I never thought Osama bin Laden would merit a place in the hagiography of the Irish Left. I remember less than sympathetic responses to religious fundamentalism of a more native and innocuous kind, when Dana dared to run for Europe, Cardinal Connell tried to do his job, and thousands dared to buy Faith of Our Fathers. Dr Noel Browne and the never-to-be forgotten International Brigade surely would not make room for a religious fundamentalist.

Claims about America's inconsistent foreign policy are legitimate in themselves but the similarly disproportionate attention by the Irish press to America's mistakes points to the true source of this animosity. Starving Afghans are ignored until America can somehow be construed as the cause. Palestinians are wailed for, while Kurds and countless thousands of Africans (remember Somalia?) are ground under the boot. And Cuba, a lovely little military dictatorship, is celebrated as the Disneyworld of the champagne socialists, while Texas is no-go because it executes anyone who does not eat hormone-pumped beef or feed oil to marsh birds.