Sunday, April 7, 2013

The Whole World Moves Forward, Except for the Arabs; Why?

Analysis by Tony Sayegh

(Scroll down for more new posts)

This is to be considered work in progress and not a finished analysis. I just wanted to initiate a real discussion in the Comment section about this important subject.

I know that some will consider some of the opinions expressed "orientalist" and will hate me for that. But let us face it, something is terribly wrong with us Arabs. We go from bad to worse and never learn from the past. If I take the Palestinians as an example, it can safely be said that the spirit and the acts of resistance in Palestine in 1936 were by far more established and advanced than they are today, 77 years later!

What other people than the Arabs were so gullible that the British used them to fight the Ottomans with a "promise" of independence, to be rewarded with the Sykes-Picot agreement, partitioning of the Arab world, British and French colonialism and granting of Palestine to world Jewry and the dispossession of the Palestinians?

And yet after all this we see Syrian "revolutionaries" begging the same France and Britain for military help to depose the dictator in Damascus! Nothing was learned?

No other people are more willing to kill each other and destroy their own countries as much as the Arabs. Look at Iraq and Syria as examples. It is so easy to initiate sectarian and religious hatred among the Arabs that all Israel has to do is to start the flames and the Arabs will destroy themselves by themselves. Israel is now gloating that Syria will not be a threat for at least the next 20 years, since it is already fragmented into 3 mini states. The same goes for Iraq.

No other Fascist regime burned and destroyed the country as the price to be paid for its ouster. Compare Syria under the Assads and Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. The ruthless internal security apparatus in Syria was modeled after that of Ceaușescu  But when the people of Romania rose against the dictator, the Romanian army stood with the people and against the dictator, who was later executed. In Syria, the army of the regime is destroying its own cities using jets, heavy artillery and missiles!

Muslims get infuriated when Israel fires on mosques and yet in Syria (and Iraq before) mosques are routinely shelled and destroyed by both sides who call themselves Muslims! Ancient and historical mosques that were preserved in Syria for hundreds of years are being shelled and destroyed today!

During the Iraq-Iran war, Henry Kissinger enunciated the US policy as simply letting both sides destroy each other; when one side began to fall, the US would help just enough so that it stayed in the fight for the longest possible duration. Is this not what is happening in Syria today? And yet, Syrian "revolutionaries" are begging the US to interfere! USrael is laughing its head off about such stupidity and naivety.

I will add more to this analysis later, but I would like to read your comments first.  

I am not going to give a diagnosis nor prescribe a cure. I will make some observations about conditions that are contributing to the Arab backwardness and them remaining largely irrelevant to modern history.

To start with, and this is crucial, the Arabs have mostly failed in establishing modern states with constitutions that guarantee and safeguard the rights of all citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity. This has perpetuated the status quo where a few elite, from the military or with the active support of the military, act as if the country is their private estate and the citizens are just squatters on that estate. A citizen who is treated that way, will not act to defend that state which does not belong to him. This explains the demise of all the Arab militaries, regardless of how much is spent on them. They are not made up of citizen soldiers.

A modern constitution would establish independent branches of government, including the judiciary and a free press. A look at today's Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood illustrates this. As soon as a MB president was elected, he wasted no time to ram through his own variant of a constitution which gave him dictatorial powers. He also appointed one of his cronies as an attorney general. As soon as that was accomplished, the crackdown on free speech and dissent started. The small margins of free expression in the press are now being seriously threatened.

All of this is just the beginning. Without resistance, the MB aim to control all aspects of the state and society. So Egypt has just replaced one dictator with another. This also illustrates another problem which afflicts all Arab countries. The longer a dictator is tolerated, in the name of stability and as a result of fear, the higher the price the country pays down the road. Syria today illustrates this point. If 40 years ago Syrians were willing to pay the price to get rid of the first Assad dictator, there would not have been a second Assad dictator and the country could have been saved from total destruction.  The Assad dynasty has had over 40 years to control every aspect of the military, the economy, civil society, etc. It is like a cancer that has already invaded all organs of the body.

And here is a lesson for the Egyptians: Do not let up in your resistance to the MB. Given more time, they would be that much harder to remove. They do not believe in democracy nor elections. They used elections to rise to power and they have no intention of abdicating that power.

To be continued.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Speaking as a Palestinian who grew up in Canada and visits Jordan every few years, I think the problem is that Arabs are just so full of shit. They're hypocritical, and sheep-like; I think a big part of it comes from self-righteousness and narrow-mindedness partly derived from religion/culture.

Because of their puritan form of self-righteousness I've found Arabs to be extremely judgemental of others. In Jordan, most people I know hate shiites even though they've never meet one. Growing up in Canada I can appreciate that shiites have most things in common with us and have a common interest. And its not just shiites, I get so annoyed when Arabs immigrate to Canada and within their first few months start to criticize, stereotype, generalize about whites and their personal lives .

Arabs think they are know it alls. They have no useful curiosity about the universe that surrounds them. When I drop interesting scientific facts (common knowledge in the west) about the universe or whatever I'm always looked at like a liar, brainwashed or something. I lose hope in humanity when I hear Arabs with masters degrees or whatever quote bullshit facts about science. They say stupid things like all rockets that go into space have to fly over Jerusalem, or other such crap.

You talk about how Arabs don't learn their lessons. How they were stupid not to see the Sykes picot agreement coming, and how they fall into the same mistakes today.

Well consider this: Sunnis today lookup to Saddam Hussein. They think he lived as a martyr and that all war crimes (against the Shiites and Kurds)attributed to him are fabrications by the West. Shiites hate Saddam Hussein.

Well, don't you find it interesting that Shiites today lookup to Bashar Al-Asshat? They think he is some type of martyr and that all his war crimes (against the Sunnis and Kurds)are fabrications by the West.

Arabs are too stupid to even step back and make the comparison and take lessons. I point this out to some shiites I know, and they still won't admit they're hypocrites full of shit.

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ArabSemite said...

Tony, good start and good to hear your thoughts again away from the youtube videos. As a Palestinian American and lifelong in diaspora, I've spent decades trying to explain to myself, and recreate my history and culture from afar. As I've watched arab countries disintegrate, I think we have lost a deep understanding of our ancient roots, history, and culture. Zionism survives today partly because it is based on an ancient, albeit ahistorical myth with a few crumbs of evidence to support it. We have a richness of history that goes back thousands of years, yet when I speak to Arabs in the Arab world, or in the US, no one seems to know or care. See for instance Irfan Shahid's book series "Byzantium and the Arabs". While Israel destroys all evidence of our ancient history, we do the same thing. It's not taught in schools, perhaps because of the conventional wisdom that our history somehow had an one-time jahiliya.

We no longer know how to explain ourselves, how we get to where we are, where we come from. Every time a mosque, church, or ancient site is destroyed in Iraq, Syria, Saudi, Yemen, Palestine, we lose more of our narrative.

Anonymous said...

The core-problem is intervention and corruption.
Imagine Mexico intervened in the US and delivered weapons to every sectarian or political madman in the US...

Another reason is, that the ME is plenty of minorities and sects - religious and national - making it very easy to find a collaborator or strawman.

Besides that you can find stupid or badly educated people everwhere - not only in Arabia. I remenber talking with fishermen in the south of Brasil in the 1990's. They didn't believe, that earth is a sphere ...

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Anonymous said...

7asbi Allah Wa ni3m alwakeel.

Everything Tony said is right. Hopefully weve reached the lowest point and can onnly go up from here? wishful thinking I know

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