Tag: Arabs

Promoted to the frontpage 

The failure of the Iraq "experiment" will have dire repercussions far beyond the immediate matters of waging a war (and losing it). Particularly in recent weeks, I have sensed an increased frustration from friends about "the Arabs." Why can't they get their act together? Why are they killing each other not only in Iraq, but also in Palestine and Lebanon? These do, indeed, bear the appearance of a largely internal problem and in some ways they are. But I worry that we are being led to a kind of revised essentialism - that Arabs do not deserve democracy because the three country-polities that seemed most democratic (in, say, 2005) are either in the midst of civil war or on the brink of one. So we hear more and more that (maybe) Arabs aren't really cut out for the ideological compromise and give-and-take of modern democratic politics. For example, although John Burns doesn't say it outright, that seems to be the implication of what he said to Tim Russert in a recent interview:

My guess is that history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done, except to impose its own repressive state with half a million troops, which might have had to last ten years or more, nothing we could have done would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring.

Keep in mind that John Burns, despite his admirable reporting skills, seems to know very little about Islam or the history of the Middle East. This is someone who after spending several years in Baghdad wasn't aware that Muslims had something called the "shahada" (see here for more). I've also noticed Andrew Sullivan's changing tone. And then there's Tom Friedman.

The problem is that Arabs are not and cannot be "inherently" anything. I'm not a big fan of what one might call "Arab political culture" either, but we have to ask whether this culture is, itself, the problem or a symptom of another, bigger problem (in social science, the indepedent vs. the dependent variable). It is most certainly the latter. There's nothing static about culture as even the most cursory knowledge of Arab history would suggest. Culture can indeed be altered, for better or worse. In the 1950s and 60s, Arab society was overwhelmingly secular, to the point where the word "Islamism" would have had no meaning - because it simply didn't exist beyond a very tiny minority. 

A Jewish group is giving an award to an Arab man from Tunisia who saved Jews in the holocaust:

Abdelwahhab served as an interlocutor between the population of the coastal town of Mahdia and German forces, Satloff said.

When he heard that German officers were planning to rape Odette Boukris, a local Jewish woman, he gathered her family and several other Jewish families in Mahdia — around two dozen people — and took them to his farm outside town. He hid them for four months, until the occupation ended.

"Khaled is the finest example, though not the only one, of an Arab who saved Jews from persecution during the German occupation," Satloff said.

Satloff first heard Abdelwahhab's story several years ago from Odette Boukris' daughter, Anny Boukris, a resident of a Los Angeles suburb. An 11-year-old in 1943, Anny Boukris was also hidden by Abdelwahhab.

Satloff went to Mahdia and talked to Anny Boukris' childhood friends, who confirmed the story. Just weeks after Boukris recorded her 83-page testimony, she died at age 71.

Abdelwahhab still has to be approved by the Yad Vashem commission that grants the honor. Since the war, Yad Vashem has conferred the status on 21,700 people, including some 60 Muslims from the Balkans. But no Arab had ever been nominated.

Related:

Muslims save 1700 children in the holocaust

Khatami: Holocaust is historical reality

From a junior immigration attorney (whose family is Pakistani):

My boss told me today that as an immigration lawyer I shouldnt let any Arabs into the country bc they are all here to kill us, then he said he wouldn't have hired me if i was Arab bc i might come upstairs and shoot him.