Osama is gone, Bouazizi lives on

BlaiseP says:

The Arabic press has been maundering on pointlessly for decades about the rise and fall of Osama bin Laden. The Arabs didn’t understand him when he went off to fight in Afghanistan: for a good long while he was a photogenic hero, so self-effacing, fighting jihaad.

We have Bin Laden to thank for the reappearance of that word in Arabic, beyond some corners of Islamic studies. Go to any masjid, then and now, and you’ll hear platitudes by the ton on the subject, but it was a dead a concept as the Crusaders is to us now. Now nobody wants to preach sermons on the subject, except to point out how horribly wrong AQ was to think they were actually fighting jihaad and how we ought to struggle against the evil within us and various other such pudding-like confections and tropes along those lines.

My take on all this, reading the Arabic papers pretty much every day, is that AQ is a lasting embarrassment. Secretly, folks hoped someone would see beyond AQ’s violence and listen to what OBL was saying about America’s long history of meddling

The Arabic press had plenty to say about Crusaders. It’s a label used to describe America’s unconditional support for Israel and the un-Mediterranean aspects of Israeli leadership, egged on by the Jewish lobbies in America, all those English-speaking Arabs in good suits (honest men wear dishdasha), nattering on blithely at Davos and other such joints, et. al. rant rant foam foam. Arabs love nothing so much as a good tale of conspiracy.

AQ is yet another failure in a long history of Arab intellectual failures. The Ottomans failed, mostly because they were alternately aloof and oppressive and little in between, and of course they weren’t Arabs, whatever that means (nothing in my opinion). Then there were the Strong Men, and they didn’t like them either, for obvious reasons. Israel gave the Strong Ben many embarrassing beatdowns (al-Naqba, translates roughly to catastrophe, but a catastrophe with shameful overtones) and Israel’s continuing existence is the apotheosis of their shame.

And now, dollars to donuts, despite the joyful ululations and banner waving and hugging in the streets, the Arab Revolutions have hit the wall. Syria batters down its opposition with increasing ruthlessness, Qadhafi stubbornly hangs on, Bahrain’s revolt ended horribly, KSA is busily distributing goodies to friend and foe alike, their response to every such crisis. The dust settles on the bomb crater of Egypt’s revolution and the military is still there, dully and stupidly preserving the status quo ante.

Sartre once said we are condemned to be free because once we’re thrown into the world, we become responsible for what we do. Using the inverse of this stern and completely accurate conclusion, the Arabs have never once taken responsibility for anything and are therefore condemned to be prisoners. It’s Israel’s fault, it’s our wretched leaders’ fault, it’s America’s fault, it’s the Shiite’s fault, anything but accept responsibility for their own actions. To be sure, in a world run by the dictator and his secret police, it’s easy to avoid responsibility, for the vast majority of the Arabs are more sinned-against than sinner. And yes, it’s true, some of the braver souls are standing up to be counted.

OBL may be dead and his followers scattered like sheep among wolves. But let’s get real here, OBL was a great hero to most Arabs for he repeatedly slapped the face of America and lived to tell the tale for another decade. The Arabs are as conflicted by OBL as they are by his enemy, the USA: once great forces for good, in our hubris both were sucked into the maelstrom of war they felt the other had provoked, a war from which no winners have emerged, a war which has put thousands of America soldiers in their graves and hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Pashtuns and Kurds in theirs as well. The colossal destruction of those wars is ongoing and it shows every sign of destabilizing the only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons, Pakistan. Should Pakistan fall, this past decade is only a minor prelude, a wet squib compared to the war to come.Report