generalspeaking

Long Past Time

It is long past time in the Arab and Islamic world for governing and social maturity. That maturity could be expressed in a governing hierarchy, an academic elite, a clerical leadership to take ownership of their singular responsibility to the vast numbers of people whom they collectively represent. Those people who groan under the weight of a culturally-determined life cycle repeating itself endlessly with little gain in the social compact, or advance in the political structure, thanks to the clutch of fundamentalist interpretation of Islam on every facet of human endeavours in those lands.

Thus the thin veneer of civilized concern for the well-being of the populations whom theocracies and kingdoms and authoritarian governments oversee remains just that; a conceit of caring, where none actually exists. Where respect for human rights is an unknown, an unrecognized quality of life known to exist in countries of the degraded West, but quite unnecessary in the lands of Islam. Where an incautiously expressed dissent relating to politics or religion is cause for imprisonment, sometimes worse.

Where blasphemy or even more dire, the shedding of belief in Islam for the acceptance of another religious belief renders the individual ripe for imprisonment, occasionally torture, and sometimes the death sentence. Where religious minorities are harassed and sometimes their presence strictly forbidden on pain of incarceration, torture, and perhaps disappearance. Where the cure for homosexuality is simple and direct; social torment, incarceration, sometimes the death penalty.

Where women are enslaved as mere social and practical appendages of men. With no direct social or human rights of their own, everything revolving around the men who own them. Where a woman imprudent enough to be seen in public with a man not her father, brother or husband can be accused of improper conduct verging on loose morals occasioning banishment from the family hearth, and sometimes worse, in the assuagement of outraged family honour.

Where a woman, or a girl, having been raped, is considered unclean and somehow personally responsible for the brutal assault, then committed to prison or, as has been practised commonly, put out of her misery by a family member restoring family honour. Or sentenced to a grisly publicly-attended stoning death by a cleric whose stern admonishment to the community is that such an assault on Islamic values will not be tolerated.

Where unemployment is high, and so is corruption. The corrupt live handsomely and are highly respected in their civil service and teaching and clerical positions, while the unemployed are perfectly free to starve, or beg, or thieve in desperate attempts to feed their malnourished children. And when brought to justice as a commonly-despised thief, suffer limb amputation, or, occasionally, a public flogging or a death sentence.

Order, above all, must be maintained. And respect for authority. And it must be seen to that the population cleaves faithfully to the precepts and ordinations of their Divinity and His esteemed Messenger, obeying the Koran and praying multiple times daily to ensure that they submit entirely to Allah's will. For His will must be done. It is just and moot and simply as things are, not to be questioned, but faithfully accepted. Giving purpose and meaning to otherwise meaning-scant lives.

Islamic precepts and the hallowed love for the people toward their God is foremost in mind and represents the very reason for existence. Another unifying principle of Islamic brotherhood is the integral and shared detestation of foreign elements; above all the burning antipathy toward Jews, Zionists and the abhorrent State of Israel, offensive to Allah by its forbidden presence on Arab land.

For it is as Saudi columnist Turki Al-Hamad, writing in the London Arab daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat, that the existence of Israel has become the single unifying geopolitical issue of the Arab world, dominating Arab life and politics, giving fresh ammunition by its very existence in the Middle East, to hate-spumed threats and ongoing intimidation in useless attempts to banish its presence from the territory.

The presence of Israel, and the plight of the Palestinians has been one of Islam's precious gifts to its nations. A people, an ideology and a religion beyond contempt, one which can be looked down at with justifiable anger and disgust, so far removed from the splendid righteousness of Islam that it qualifies as a distinct failure in human existence. Israel, the dread occupier, the bestial overseer of poor landless Palestinians.

Those very same Arabs, the Palestinians, that other Arabs love to patronize for their perceived value in the struggle against the Zionist Imperialists. This is their value to the greater Arab and Islamic world; as a living symbol of the wrongs done by Jews to Arabs. The wrongs done to Palestinian Arabs by other Arabs by their unwillingness to absorb and welcome them into their societies, to grant them legitimacy and stature and opportunities in those lands is inconvenient and irrelevant.

Jordan, alone among the Arab countries, has absorbed and bestowed legality upon the Palestinians, but not before a bloody civil war took thousands of lives. Now, a Palestinian woman shares the Jordanian throne. Other Arabs just happen to be suspicious about the civility and proneness to violence that appears to distinguish the Palestinian male character. Which appears to be the reason that they are held at arms' length, denied citizenship, employment, equality.

There is always the example of Lebanon, where Palestinian refugees live in sprawling, squalid refugee camps, scorned by Lebanese Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, as well as the Druze, as human refuse. That human refuse assembled itself under the banner of an Islamist jihad-aspiring champion, presenting as a very real threat to established Lebanon, aided and abetted by sinister elements representing government interests in neighbouring countries.

Hezbollah now has been absorbed into the government of Lebanon. That country desperately trying to balance its sovereignty against the grasping intentions of those very same neighbours for whom Hezbollah represents a proxy army of militants with a social and political arm - warriors with a twofold purpose; to upset the legally constituted government of Lebanon and to make endless war on their common enemy, the Zionist entity. Lebanon attempts to wrest armaments from the hands of Hezbollah, to no avail. It remains a country viciously divided.

How is it that the elder-statesmen-countries of the region do not exert their influence; political, financial and religious, to greater purpose in establishing peaceful relations between all nations in the Middle East, inclusive of Israel, determined to remain where ancient history installed them and modern calamity established them? The inertia of customs and traditions, the comfort of the wealthy Gulf States in looking inwardly, never outwardly.

And the usefulness of Israel in never having to explain to their national dependants why and how they establish and maintain their economies, their blemish-free governments, by reminding all who will listen that the enemy is in their midst and must be vanquished. The classical dodge since time immemorial of self-availing tyrants and dictatorial overseers; produce a victim so that all may pounce upon him for ultimate satisfaction and complementary clouding of vital issues.

So, it is as Turki Al-Hamad claims in mourning the lack of maturity evidenced in Arab life: "Israel has been, and to a great extent still is, the cornerstone of modern Arab political culture and the primary measure of politics in the region. Despite the fact that the Palestinians themselves, whose cause this is first and foremost, have in effect lost consciousness of their cause, and have entered a stage of political infantility and childish quarrels over trivial matters - despite this fact, the status of the 'cause' in political culture and modern Arab political behavior has not changed much in many respects.

"This is similar to those 'revolutionary' regimes that come in the name of the people and for the benefit of the people, and then kill off the people and the people's interests - yet continue to speak in the name of the people and about the people. In this case, 'the people' becomes a political myth justifying anything and everything - even though it does not exist outside of the mind, [and remains in the mind] even when what is in the mind contradicts what is in the real world.

"Israel and Zionism have always been the axis around which the other components of modern Arab political culture revolved, and the measure against which the compass of Arab politics was largely set. This is in addition to the fact that [this axis] has been the primary 'justification' for every failure and disaster in modern Arab life: from the failure of the project of the great Arab renaissance and of the great Arab unity, to a child's death by starvation in Basra in Shatt Al-'Arab and an emigrant's drowning in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, to a woman's death from poverty on the banks of the Nile in the Nile river valley.

"For were it not for Israel and Zionism, and the colonialism, imperialism, and occupation they brought in their wake, there would not have been any division, backwardness, ignorance, illness, or wretchedness, and thus no one would have died of starvation, drowning, illness, or poverty. Israel was always sought out [for blame], to the point where one can't imagine that the Arabs are really serious in their hostility to Israel, since if the real, earthly Israel were to disappear, how could they preserve the Israel of the mind and the imagination, without which Arab political life would be choked off, as it would have lost its justification and there would be no longer any direction towards which the Arab compass would point.

"In modern Arab political life, Israel and Zionism have become the be-all and end-all, just as the past, and the glorification of it, became the unquestioned givens of 'modern' Arab culture."

So it is, so it has been. Will it continue to reflect modern reality?

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Israel, Middle East

posted by Pieface @ Friday, December 19, 2008