By Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 16 July 2008
".....The summit, which convened in Paris on 13 July is supposed to officially launch the Union, and to establish its permanent offices. All the would-be members were represented at the summit except the Libyan leader who harshly criticized the project as a neo-colonial European plan to divide the Arabs, and to impose normalization with Israel upon them. He predicted the plan's failure.
It is indeed a plan fraught with risks and intertwined with serious contradictions. It is not even easy to count the number of disputes that separate the 43 members of the Union, the social and economic disparities, the varied nature of problems facing each and the wide range of divergent interests and objectives.
If one of the primary goals is to combat terrorism and reduce radicalization and fundamentalism, the road to that is purely political and requires first and foremost resolution of the very chronic disputes such as the Arab-Israeli conflict which the Paris summit planned to avoid. No such grand goal can be achieved by simply bringing Arabs and Israelis, Muslims, Jews and Christians together, as Sarkozy seems sincerely to believe......."
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