Middle East dictatorships manufacture external conflict to justify internal oppression.

Evidence

In the same way, the dictatorships that rule much of the Middle East today will not, indeed cannot, make peace, because they need conflict to justify their tyrannical oppression of their own people, and to deflect their peoples’ anger against an external enemy. As with the Axis and the Soviet Union, real peace will come only with their defeat or, preferably, collapse, and their replacement by governments that have been chosen and can be dismissed by their people and will therefore seek to resolve, not provoke, conflicts. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1803

Categorization

• XREF: The scapegoating claim connects to broader scholarship on authoritarian legitimation through manufactured external enemies and to the reader’s existing Islam-West representation work on how region publics are depicted.