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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (48834)	6/5/2004 3:05:27 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793883

Being an Arab and trying to be a modern person involves believing 7 contradictory things before breakfast, to paraphrase Alice. No wonder so many of them act strangely and against their own interests.

To: LindyBill who wrote (48834)	6/5/2004 3:28:42 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793883

Did you notice how, in this whole long article on Al Jazeera, there is not one single mention of how much money Saddam Hussein paid them and their director? Not one mention? Not one hint that this might have accounted for the favorable coverage they always gave Saddam? Come to think of it, they didn't even mention the favorable coverage! Has it all just dropped into the memory hole?

To: LindyBill who wrote (48834)	6/6/2004 2:24:37 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793883

Can an intellectual operating there, where tyranny is the normal environment, actually come out and say the US way of life is the Gold Standard for people living in the Middle East? It's what they want. Their problem is that the solution for the tyranny most people there live under is democracy. It's not pan-Arabism, not Islam, not al Qaida, not the various family compacts of infinite degrees of corruption. There is no known successful alternative but democracy. When 9/11 crimes were committed some folk in the Middle East celebrated. Others - probably a vast majority - thought something like, "At last! The US is going to get serious and come clean house. " One thing I'm absolutely sure of: practically nobody in the Middle East - except the al Qaida types and some politicians - really expected the US not to come visiting in some retributive fashion. They know their countries are pestholes of corruption and tyranny breeding ever more wicked forms of brutality and corruption and exporting their worst aspects to the rest of the world and they know they are not going to reform themselves without outside influence, probably forceful. This is why the so called Arab Street doesn't "rise up" against US "interference." Nonetheless, an intellectual trying to earn a living and get by, even working at al Jazeera, can't say it directly and thus the contorted process by which the interviewer finally got here, to the Gold Standard: ?Statements and good intentions are not enough. Many Arabs were asked by the FBI to go and register. They were singled out at the airport. They were denied access to many flights. I know it?s understandable from the point of view of the Americans, but imagine yourself in an airport in a queue, and an officer says, ?You and you and you, please come here.? Especially when you are an American citizen, enjoying your constitutional rights, and you see yourself profiled and singled out, you start to think that this is a fake democracy. Because a true democracy would not make this distinction. After all, those who did 9/11 were not American citizens.? I asked Khader what the reaction would have been like in the Arab world if some American tourists had hijacked a plane full of Egyptians and run it through the pyramids. ?The reaction would have been unimaginable,? he replied, ?because the Arabs are easily emotionally affected. But at least we don?t pretend that we are democratic.? ?Well, you?re not democratic. We are.? ?So you have to act as democrats.? It's not OK to mess with the Gold Standard. I told Khader that this seemed slightly unfair to me. Though hailing from a part of the world lined wall to wall with dictatorships, he felt at liberty to criticize every infringement of a democracy that provides many Arabs with a completely free life they could never receive in their countries of origin. Khader?s voice went very quiet. ?At least,? he said, spreading his hands in front of him in an almost pleading way, ?at least people like me, they have only one dream in their lives, which is to transpose this Western democracy, as it is, with all its negative aspects, to their part of the world. At least.? What you read here is what you get with this man and other intellectuals like him. They are confined, in his word, to a dream, because he lives in a world where there is no political headroom and therefore one in which he can do no heavy lifting. He doesn't have to face directly, and must not face directly, the truth that the anti-democrats have to be coopted, subdued or exterminated. Instead, there is an unspoken assumption that democracy is necessarily peaceful, or should be peaceful - there's a normative component - but it's ultimately never been peaceful in the face of anti-democracy. The issue is existential and 9/11 events are the demonstration. The ensuing confrontations are inevitable whether they be small ones at the airport screening station or large ones in the Middle East.