Protesters in Lebanon have a simple message for Britain and the US: you cannot expect Arab democracies to operate on western terms.
Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that half the population of Britain took to the streets, slept out in the cold, raised the national flag and flew banners demanding the resignation of Tony Blair. Would the western world flock to London to offer him support? Would the US, Israel and half the enlightened democracies denounce the crowds as ignorant mobs easily swayed by agitating demagogues? Would he and his government legitimate their rule on the basis of foreign support? Would Blair declare to the world at large that the support of his own people was secondary to the support of international allies?
Let’s assume for the sake of another argument that Tony Blair came into office following elections in which he swept more than three quarters of votes in the biggest electoral turnout in the history of the UK. Would the European Union, the US and Israel rave and rant before sulking in a corner and declaring that they didn’t really like Tony Blair’s politics and had therefore decided to starve the British people for making such an unsavoury choice?
Do these two scenarios seem surreal?
They didn’t seem so surreal when they were applied to both Lebanon and the West Bank. And I am willing to bet my lunch money for a whole year that should an independent international committee be formed to gauge the degree of support for both the Hamas government and the opposition movements in Lebanon, they would reveal that both the Lebanese and Palestinian nations were in favour of those whom the west considers ‘personas non grata’.
I suggest, therefore, that the term terrorist be applied to whole nations. We could label the Lebanese people, the Palestinian people and in fact all the Arab people who are simply dying to get rid of the puppet regimes the US, Britain, France and Israel had installed, perpetuated or supported, as terrorists. We can then ship them all to Guantanamo Bay and import monkeys from the jungles of Kenya and have them guard western interests in the Arab region. We will then truly have banana republics.
It is very unfortunate and indeed short-sighted that the west still lives in the shadows of Rudyard Kipling’s ominous description of non-westerns as ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child’ whom the white man has been burdened with civilising and protecting. But unlike Kipling’s verse where the white man has to coax the ‘thankless savages’ by ‘open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain,’ the savages are now sleeping out in the streets, and delivering their own simple message to the west that the US, Britain, Israel and the rest of the purportedly enlightened modern world cannot expect democracies in the Arab world to operate on western terms. The fact the British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs had chosen to fly into Beirut to announce that Britain fully supported the Lebanese government proves beyond a shadow of doubt that Britain, if anything, has failed to understand the simple message delivered by the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese on the streets. Maybe, just maybe, someone in her office should try to make the text of the message ‘a hundred times more plain’ in case she had failed to get it the first time round.
The duplicitous nature of international involvement in the region’s affairs was unashamedly evident when the Lebanese opposition groups upped the ante in the face of the western-backed Lebanese government’s refusal of the opposition’s original demand for a national unity government. The opposition is now demanding full-fledged legislative elections and a new election law to replace the farcical one that was drawn up in a hurry in 2003. The US, Britain and Israel have all renewed their support for the Lebanese government rejecting the oppositions’ demands.
When the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas (another western and Israeli favourite), called for early elections last week, Tony Blair himself was in the West Bank to support the decision despite the fact that early elections were not only unconstitutional but had come after months during which the Palestinians had been literally starved as the US and Israel imposed an embargo on all funding to the Hamas government. Most Palestinians have not been paid for months and many are facing extreme economic hardships. Why? Because the Palestinian people had elected members from a group deemed ‘terrorist’ by western standards. In the Arab world where I live, we usually refer to both Hamas and Hizbullah as ‘national liberation movements’.
The hundreds of thousands of Lebanese sleeping out on the streets and the similar number of Palestinians starving in the West Bank epitomise the unwillingness of the west (and Israel of course), to accept democracies in the Arab world which do not result in, well, banana republics. I therefore refer you to my original suggestion to incarcerate those ungrateful Arab populaces and replace them with monkeys.
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