by As‘ad AbuKhalil

Translated by Marlin Dick

Tis the season for Arab liberals to walk in the path of their guides, namely the conservatives in the west whom they emulate. You can follow the upcoming influences on Arab liberals by following the current and earlier paths of rightist discourse in the west. Arab liberals fumble around for the traces and vestiges of these right-wingers in order to follow them and take their path. However, the western product always arrives a bit disfigured in our countries, where things end up more brazen, monstrous and vulgar. In our lands, liberalism becomes conservatism, conservatism becomes fascism, and the left becomes tired old liberalism, allied with the al-Hariri family. Only the Phalange [Kata’ib] and the Lebanese Forces have retained the western product as is. They snatched up western fascism and preserved it intact.

Take, for example, the capitalist model implemented by Rafiq al-Hariri before his assassination. You won’t find anything like it anywhere else, not even in the programs of the wildest right-wing parties in the west. He once contemplated abolishing all taxes and letting the poor fend for themselves. Didn’t he once suggest that they repair their heels rather than buy new shoes, which are only merited by the rich, or those upon whom “God has blessed with riches,” as he used to say? He used to deal with the poor as if they were a blight on society and the state. al-Hariri would have deported them if his honeymoon with Syrian intelligence had continued; the Syrians brought him in and made him prime minister for more than a decade but he was always powerless throughout these years, as the professional al-Hariri apologists would have us believe!

Tired old “clichés”

Arab liberals see themselves as creative and pioneering when they recite the racist clichés of the book The Arab Mind by Rafael Patai (described by Seymour Hersh as the Bible of the neoconservatives in the context of US wars). Even the jailers and torturers of Abu Ghraib borrowed their assumptions from this book, which was repudiated academically when it first came out. However, the book was popular in the media and among politicians and the public. Even some academics who aren’t specialized in Middle East affairs have relied on it to “understand” (or not understand) the Arabs. For example, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who was the US ambassador to the United Nations, used the book in the national security course that she taught at Georgetown University, since it was in line with her doctrine; she distinguished between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in order to permit American support for pro-American dictatorships – observe how the Libyan regime’s standing has risen by a mere transformation in its foreign policies.

Today, you read the Arab liberals – and it would be better to label them Arab conservatives, even if they’re in the garb of the Democratic Left (democracy here resembling the democracy of Kim Jung-Il, even if Elias Atallah has a past that is more Stalinist than the “supreme leader”),(1) which is allied with the agents of the World Bank in Lebanon. You read Arab liberals and find a monotonous repetition of what you could find in books by the American right a few years ago. You see the same stereotypes and generalizations about the Arabs and Islam: in the Zionist publications here, and in the writings of Wahhabi Arab liberals there, and of those who consider themselves civilized leftists, because they have managed to repudiate the poor. How glorious it is when the newspaper al-Mustaqbal exuberantly mocks the Sri Lankan and Ethiopian domestic servants who try to commit suicide. You read some of the liberal writers in Arab newspapers and can trace some of the ideas, and even expressions, back to this Zionist magazine, or that right-wing website, which has been discovered by our friend,(2) as if he has discovered a rare treasure.

For example, they talk about “the culture of life,” as if the idea is one of their own, or belongs to the Lebanese branch of Saatchi & Saatchi, which is working full-time on the Cedar Revolution account (another branch is busy with improving the image of the US occupation in Iraq in the Arab media).(3) Western Zionism, in both the Christian and Jewish strands, uses the phrase “culture of life” to reduce the credibility of the Palestinian resistance and smear Islam, just as the Municipality of Ghazir (4) recently erected a statue to Ernest Renan – academics agree he was a racist, even though his racism was dressed up in a classification of people based on a hierarchical language chart. But this is considered “cute” in the land of the cedars and chestnuts. Didn’t he breathe the air of our country? Isn’t that enough?

The Most Excellent Municipality of Beirut might commission a statue of Bernard Lewis one of these days, who knows? Fouad Ajami (the first Likudnik Arab, even if many others followed later) might return to Lebanon as a conqueror, like Iyad Allawi, who is a friend of the speaker of Parliament. Speaking of friendship, why has Chibli Mallat stopped talking about his “friend” Paul Wolfowitz? Is it because Mallat has devoted himself to promoting ways of civilized conflict with Israel (which have been totally mastered by Ahmad Fatfat) or is it because his repeated attempts to secure the patronage of the most anti-Arab and -Muslim member of Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, have failed, even if she let him attend a right-wing Republican function?

The Arab liberals, who are spokespeople for Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, talk about peace and harmony between the Arabs and Israel, after Anwar Sadat beat them to this, years ago. They have forgotten that Sadat also preceded them when it came to throwing all of his “cards” into America’s lap, even at the height of the Cold War. An American president patted Anwar Sadat on the back years before Siniora received this high honor. The Arab liberals talk about peace with Israel as a measure of civilization, the specialty of 14 March in Lebanon, and ascribe the reason for Arab crises (or backwardness as they call it today) to the resistance, just like Muhammad Ali al-Jaafari, and others allied with the Israeli occupation when Muhammad Dahlan was a young man, did before them. These liberals believe innocence is a feature of the west, and particularly the US, to avoid making the mistake of generalization and imprecision, as with the term “international legitimacy.” They also believe that the US bears no responsibility for our issues and problems, even with the presence of huge foreign armies on our soil; this is a classic imperialist tactic.

Nostalgia, Lebanonese-style

A few years ago, these western right-wingers were expressing their nostalgia for the age of colonialism and singing its praises, especially in the Middle East, since the nominal liberation of these countries was not suitable to Israel, even though the Zionist state deals easily with various Arab regimes, whether those that behave peacefully toward it or those that claim to be conducting resistance. The Iraqi-born orientalist Elie Keddourie, preceded them all with his book Democracy and Arab Political Culture, which came out at the beginning of the 1990s. Keddouri wrote poetically about the bygone days before the people who Saddam Hussein called the “riff-raff” did away with foreign rule. However, the American columnist Charles Krauthammer (who criticized the Likud for its moderation, which is the position of the neoconservatives in love with the Cedar Revolution – there’s no harm in people having similar positions, as they tell us) declared his nostalgia for the age colonialism in Africa and Asia. Today, he is the spiritual guide of the Cedar Revolution. The nostalgia for colonialism is also expressed in the positions of the US administration and the United Nations itself. What does it mean, for example, when Terje Roed-Larsen (close to, or rather stuck to, the Bush administration) pronounces his fatwas on issues related to the quorum in the Lebanese Parliament? Would Larsen dare whisper a similar remark about the succession issue in the Wahhabi Kingdom? Of course not, since Saudi Arabia is a model of near perfection in governance, by the measure of the United Nations in the era of Larsen and the new secretary general, whose hallowed name we don’t even need to memorize. Can Larsen intervene in anything having to do with the rule of Husni Mubarak, for example? Of course not, because such interference will be more apparent in regimes that are not completely under the control of American imperialism. What does it mean to have a special representative of the United Nations in Lebanon? What are the limits of his duties, if they exist? Why does a society that sings out its slogans of sovereignty, all the day long, accept hosting a delegate from the leftovers of the Mandate era, especially since the man has opinions about electoral, local, and even mukhtar-related (5) issues? Lebanese politicians from 14 March and 8 March receive [Geer] Pedersen happily and proudly, and discuss everything with him – even our country’s wonderful folklore. Lebanon will become truly independent when it permanently expels Pedersen from Lebanon and when the American ambassador’s contacts are restricted to the Foreign Ministry and he is forbidden from visiting the various ministries. Why should the American ambassador in Lebanon enjoy powers and prerogatives that the Lebanese ambassador in the US lacks? The latter would end up in Guantanamo if he intervened in the US presidential election, or if he toured the various offices of the federal government. But this is classic colonialism: the powers of a representative of a colonialist state are completely different than those of the representative of a colonized state.

The idea of accepting western colonialism goes back to the founding of this entity [Lebanon], which of course came into being, by coincidence, at a time in which the Zionist movement was trying to establish a Jewish state on the land of Palestine. Will the Maronite Patriarchate ever release the text and documents of the agreement signed between it and the Zionist movement in 1946? The Lebanese idea, since its founding, has been based on contradicting the idea of Arab solidarity, which appeared even prior to the idea of unity, a concept that the Ba‘thists mutilated so much as they caused division and fragmentation in the name of merger-based unification. Lebanon was drawn up as a country acting as an agent for the west (politically, economically and even militarily in the Chamoun era), on the basis of establishing a polity and seeing it adopt western colonialism. Thus, Lebanon explains western domination (American in nature, although it tries to hide behind the lie of the “international community,” as if this is an independent body that expresses the desires of the countries of the world with honesty and transparency) as proof of [international] solidarity with Lebanon, just as the allies of the Syrian regime see Damascus’ nurturing of the country as a translation of Arabism.

The role of the media

Nostalgia for colonialism appears in several Arab countries and on several levels, paid for by the Wahhabi regime’s control over the media. King Farouq of Egypt will fill the small screen during Ramadan nights in a new television series, funded by Gulf money. From being a tool of the British, King Farouq turns into a leader who was misunderstood. Viewers can be proud that King Farouq didn’t touch spirits (because he didn’t like their taste), while Islam prohibits drinking but not serving colonialism, according to the tale of this great king. Who knows, they might end up preparing to re-institute the law to prevent impugning the “royal person.” Likewise, we can see the Arab media exploit certain occasions, such as the anniversaries of wars or coups d’etat, to rewrite history in a way that is contrary to popular memory. The British colonial regime in Egypt becomes a source of nostalgia and pride, while we learn how the Egyptian Revolution strayed from the true path. Arab liberal writers in the Arabic-language press try to do the same thing when it comes to the regime of Nuri al-Said in Iraq, as he appears to be another person who was misunderstood, and no more. This is how the Arab media exhibits nostalgia for colonialism, when the regimes were about “spoiled ghee” (Syria), “there were no orders” (Iraq), and “obsolete weapons” (Egypt). Thus, American colonialism and its Arab advocates try to convince us that the choice is between Saddam Hussein and a return of colonialism; the option of true independence is merely a mirage.

Nostalgia for colonialism appears throughout the Arab press when it comes to evaluating and assessing contemporary Arab history, and this nostalgia is in line with the plans of the US administration for the Middle East. There’s an expression in English, “neo-colonialism,” but the Bush White House has in fact returned us to the age of classical colonialism. The indications of classical colonialism appear on several levels, especially since the White House has realized its objective in the form of cooperative Arab governments that have opened their territory to foreign armies and American intelligence organizations. The nature of the Arab regimes after the invasion of Kuwait has been revealed; Kuwaiti and western media portrayed the suffering of the Kuwaiti people under Saddam’s occupation as if it outweighed the suffering of the Palestinian people over a number of decades. Successive US administrations expressed their outrage at Gulf oil states when they declined to host American forces on their soil, but all of this changed after the invasion. Stephen F. Hayes’ recently-published biography of Dick Cheney shows us that the US administration was determined to deploy its forces in the region after the invasion of Kuwait, with or without official invitations. The nostalgia for colonialism also entered the investigation of the 11 September attacks. The White House believed that the only way to take care of the region was to do so directly, without subcontracting wars to allied regimes. The regimes were more than subservient, and Abdel-Nasser, who frightened them so, is dead; the Palestinian revolution is now in the hands of Mohammed Dahlan, and the Hamas movement has become busy with the concerns of exercising political power.

From Ramallah to Morocco

Lebanon has always been a candidate to lead the charge when it comes to serving colonialism; the country feels very proud to host foreign, non-Arab armies on its soil. We don’t know why Rafiq Ali Ahmad wants to sing the praises Unifil forces, for example.(6) Does anyone think that they have come here to defend Lebanon? Has no one learned from the history of these forces? Have they repulsed a single Israeli aggression since they graced our lands with their presence? They say that UNIFIL is a witness to Israeli aggression, although UN reports are subject to a political re-write in Washington. Didn’t they read Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s memoirs about his experience in the UN? Witnesses? They are the type of witnesses that Ali bin Abi Talib called “absent witnesses.” Even though Fouad Siniora said the statement by German Chancellor Angela Merkel was a joke, wasn’t her comment sufficient? The US Marines, who arrived on our shores twice in Lebanon’s contemporary history, were welcomed in several parts of the country. We can’t forget that there were those (Sunnis, Shi’a, Druze and Christians) who welcomed Israeli troops in 1982 by throwing rice at them?

Colonialism has returned to our countries, welcomed by the ruling dynasties. The leaders of some sects thought that colonialism would help them get rid of their rivals, but they were wrong about this. Wasn’t Muhammad Dahlan installed as the ruler of Gaza? Didn’t Amin Gemayel rely on two foreign armies to rule his country and his people? The struggle for the second liberation, from neo-colonialism, in our region will be more difficult than the first. This is not only due to the end of the Cold War, the international recognition of absolute US global dominance, and the might of American empire, but because the second wave of colonialism is buttressed by the local powers-that-be, from Ramallah to Morocco, and of course, passing through the Government Serail in Beirut.

This article was originally published in Arabic in al-Akhbar on 17 September 2007.

Footnotes:

1. The Democratic Left Movement is a small, elite-dominated reformist leftist party, a member of the 14 March movement in Lebanon; Atallah is an MP for the group and former member of the Lebanese Communist Party.

2. Based on Abu Khalil’s recent writings on Lebanon, the “friend” in question here is Walid Jumblatt.

3. “I love life” is a Saatchi-designed slogan of the 14 March coalition against the Hizbullah-led 8 March opposition alliance.

4. In Kesrouan, Lebanon.

5. This is the lowest level of elected office in Lebanon.

6. The reference is to a recent Lebanese television documentary in which this famous actor tours the south and its peacekeeping forces (after the July War of 2006).

Bio:

As’ad AbuKhalil is professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley. He was born in Tyre, Lebanon and grew up in Beirut. He received a BA and MA from American University of Beirut in political science, and a PhD in comparative government from Georgetown University. He has taught at Taught at Tufts University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Colorado College, and Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. His writings can be found on his web log, the Angry Arab News Service. His favorite food is fried eggplants.

Marlin Dick is a freelance journalist based in Lebanon. He writes on Arabic politics, media and culture and has translated Arabic literature and films.