Where is the Arab Patrick Henry? BY SHMULEY BOTEACH Nov. 2, 2002
Tensions are mounting around the world as nations debate whether an American-led invasion has a mandate to topple Saddam Hussein and liberate the Iraqi people.
I have just returned from England where I debated the issue, first at the Oxford Union, against Abdul Bari al Atwan, the editor of Al Quds, the largest Arabic daily in Europe, and then in London, where The Times sponsored a debate on the morality of war among the winners of its annual Preacher of the Year Competition. It was sobering to discover just how many Europeans, especially religious leaders, view US President Geroge W. Bush as a gun-slinging cowboy and the Americans who support him (including myself) as reckless warmongers.
But what strikes me as the most important question in the Iraqi debate is not should America liberate Iraq, but rather why should America have to liberate Iraq at all? How have the Iraqi people come to be living under one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, and why haven't they cast off Saddam's yoke in open and popular rebellion?
Indeed, how have hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, throughout the Middle East and North Africa allowed themselves to be ruled by thugs like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashir Assad? Is it not ironic that Arabs, with a gallant history of more than a thousand years of military conquest and empire-building, should allow themselves to be bullied by a small group of corrupt dictators who utterly abuse their human rights?
How can Arabs who for hundreds of years, while Europe slept in the Dark Ages, led the world in scientific, medical, and philosophical inquiry, live under a dictator like Saddam who so insults their intelligence by even claiming a 100 percent mandate in an uncontested election?
As an American, I believe wholeheartedly in the ideals set out by our founding fathers, that all men are created equal and that each has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As well as encroaching upon his people's financial and political rights, Saddam has determined that millions have no right to life whatsoever, massacring hundreds of thousands without the slightest hesitation. At the same time as I relish the fact that I am fortunate enough to live in a society that values the ideals of democracy and equal opportunity, I am perplexed by the question of how 20 million Iraqis have allowed themselves to be ruled by a barbarous despot, without much effort to topple him.
The ancient Arabs were a proud, advanced and glorious civilization. In the ninth century, Al-Mamun, caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, established state-funded places of study, focusing on translations of Greek and other works of antiquity, that predated the first European universities by more than 300 years.In the 16th century, the Muslim Sultan Akbar of India was known for his cross-cultural appointments to office, his enactment of laws embracing religious tolerance and protection of women and children, and was one of the first military commanders to insist upon the proper treatment of captured enemy troops.
So where did the descendants of Al-Mamun and Sultan Akbar lose their way?
More than 200 years have passed since the ideals of liberty and equality have become commonplace in the national ethos of so many countries around the world. We therefore have to ask why it is that the British colonists who formed the new United States balked at, and rebelled against, the slightest hint of tyrannical behavior while millions of Arabs today still seem to yield to lives stained by oppression and deprivation. It seems obvious that for centuries there has been no Arabic Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson to fuel the fires of discontent in a productive manner against a clear and conquerable adversary.
The American colonists knew that the British monarchy and parliament were unjustly imposing taxation without representation, and when they demanded liberty from such tyranny, they never lost sight of who the enemy was or what the ultimate goal of their armed efforts must be.
For the past few generations, we have seen leaders of the Arab world mislead their people with the same tactics Hitler used when he managed to take a free-thinking people laboring beneath difficult economic conditions and enslave them under a mythical notion that the source of their discontent was something other than the laws of economics and governmental mismanagement. He used the scapegoat method of distracting the attention of the disgruntled target population away from the seat of power, by making the Jew the cause of all misfortune.
So too have the leaders of the Arab world misled those whom they have oppressively chained in totalitarianism. Rather than addressing the economic, educational, social, medical and political ills of their populations, these heads of state beguile and delude their citizens. They fuel an illogical hatred for Israel with an even more illogical rationale that, were the State of Israel to be eradicated, their own troubles would suddenly evaporate. Amazingly, this canard has worked. Indeed, my opponent in my recent Oxford debate, one of the world's most respected Arab journalists and a fine gentleman, remarkably blamed Saddam's emergence on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
IT'S TIME for a reality check. Even if many of the Arabs got their wish and Israel was wiped off the map, would it restore to the Iraqi people the wealth that has been plundered by the corrupt House of Saud? Would it suddenly allow Arabs throughout the Middle East to read the truth in a newspaper, or to criticize their governments in public without fear of torture or imprisonment?
Hatred of Israel has produced one of the greatest injustices in the history of the world -- not against the Jews, but against innocent Arabs. By blaming all Arab ills on the monstrous Zionist entity, the Arab dictators have successfully shifted their people's rage away from themselves and onto Israel.
Saddam enjoys a life of luxury while his people starve. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak throws human-rights activists who are critical of his dictatorship into prison after sham trials. Yet still, under these oppressive regimes, the citizens of these countries refuse to rebel. Instead, they seem to accept that they have no control over their destinies, and, in every possible way, they live without representation. Of course, the tragic irony is that the one country in which Arabs have enjoyed freedom and democracy is Israel, the very enemy the Arab world has scapegoated as the source of all evil. The only place in the entire Middle East where Arabs have the right to vote is Israel.
Only when an Arab-Israeli has declared himself to be an enemy of the state has he been denied the freedoms and benefits of citizenship.The reality is that as long as the people of the Arab world continue to allow themselves to be thrown off course, as long as they harbor an irrational hatred of five million Jews in a tiny country in the Middle East rather than taking a lesson from the Declaration of Independence, debates such as whether the United States should sweep in to remove evil dictatorships will persist.
Indeed, how demoralizing and tragic is this dependency for the descendants of great Islamic sultans such as Akbar and Saladin?
