http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-mythical-sino-islamic-nexus-6753The National Interest
The Mythical Sino-Islamic Nexus
Raise
a Middle East policy issue during a meeting of Western diplomats and
academics, and there is little doubt that a long and heated debate would
ensue; it would include references to European imperialism and
anti-Semitism, the Crusades and the Holocaust, Islamophobia and the
Israel Lobby, democracy and the relationship between religion and state,
not to mention several detailed plans to resolve the conflict in the
Holy Land. Bring up the same issue during a discussion between Chinese
officials and intellectuals, and much of the focus of a relatively brief
and calm exchange would be on traditional foreign-policy
considerations: the region’s energy resources, its strategic location,
the relationship between its major states, the influence of outside
powers and maybe an allusion to the latest Israeli-Palestinian surge in
violence.
Indeed, American foreign-policy experts who visit Beijing are
surprised by the almost detached and calculated analysis of the
developments in the area of the world that their Chinese counterparts
refer to sometimes as “West Asia.” With close to one hundred years of
almost obsessive preoccupation by the West with the conflict between
Arabs and Jews in the Middle East—and with half a century of U.S.
diplomatic hyperactivism and military intervention in the
region—Americans seem to exhibit what psychologists refer to as
“projection bias,” ascribing their own fixation with the Middle East to
the Chinese.
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