Please do not respond to this article. It is not meant to be a Political discussion piece. It just happens to be the best explanantion of the part of the world that many of us do not understand. I read it and learned alot about thhe side of things we hear so little about.

VIEW OF THE ARAB WORLD BY AN ARAB.

The Arab who wrote this is: Haim Harari, Chair, Davidson Institute
of Science Education.

"A View from the Eye of the Storm"

Talk delivered by Haim Harari at a meeting of the International
Advisory Board of a large multi-national corporation, April, 2004:

" As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological
"entertainment" in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman
suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part
of the world from which I come.

I have never been and I will never be a Government official and I
have no privileged information. My perspective is entirely based on what I
see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has lived in this region
for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as those of the
proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when you visit a
country.

I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some
personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch
upon it only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the
broader picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the
entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab,
predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also
significant non-Moslem minorities.

Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood?
Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might
read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never
been the central issue in the upheaval in the region.

Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not
where the main show is. The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had
nothing to do with Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan,
where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens,
has nothing to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about
the murders of hundreds of civilians in one village or another by other
Algerians have nothing to do with Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade
Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of
Israel. Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of
Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens
in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel. The Taliban control of
Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel. The
Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and
I could go on and on and on. But enough on Israel. It's a red
herring to the root causes I wish to discuss.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally
dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if
Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had
existed for 100 years.

The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the
Gulf States, have a total population of 300 million, larger than the US
and almost as large as the EU before its expansion. They have a land
area larger than either the US or all of Europe. These 22 countries,
with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than
that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California
alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond
belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in
business, but by being corrupt rulers. The social status of women is far
below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago. Human rights are
below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya
was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. Con't............

 

........According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals
and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books
translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little
Greece alone translates. Birth rates in the region are very high,
increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline.
And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago,
was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem
area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced
cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground
for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide
murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in
the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western
Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything,
except themselves.

A word about the millions of decent, honest, good people who are
either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in Moslem
families:

They are double victims of an outside world, which now develops
Islamophobia and of their own environment, which breaks their heart
by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast silent
majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement,
but they also do not stand up against it. They become accomplices, by
omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals, business
people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from wrong,
but are afraid to express their views.

The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which
have always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present
upheaval in the region. A few more years may pass before everybody
acknowledges that it is a World War, but we are already well into it.

These are the four main pillars of the current World Conflict, or
perhaps we should already refer to it as "the undeclared World War III":

1. The first element is the suicide murder.

Suicide murders are not a new invention but they have been made
popular, if I may use this expression, only lately. Even after September
11, it seems that most of the Western World does not yet understand this
weapon. It is a very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact
is relatively minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of
suicide
murders within Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due
to car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than
many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than
all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide
murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more
people
than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition
occupation of Iraq.

So what is all the fuss about suicide killings?

It creates headlines. It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is
a very cruel death with bodies dismembered and horrible severe lifelong
injuries to many of the wounded. It is always shown on television in great
detail. One such murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can
destroy the tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in
Bali and in Turkey. But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that
no
defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined
suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western
World. The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense against
the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport
security in the world. But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not
have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill many people.
Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting
to be checked by the airport metal detector? How about the lines to the
check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front
of every train station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses.
Protect the buses and they will explode in movie theaters, concert halls,
supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front
of every concert hall and there will always be a line of people to be
checked
by the guards and this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the
guards themselves. You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by
preventive and defensive measures and by strict border controls but not
eliminate it and definitely not win the war in a defensive way. And it
is a war!
con't.............

 

What is behind the suicide murders?

Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else.
It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem
preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or
religious leader has ever blown himself up. No relative of anyone
influential has done it. Wouldn't you expect some of the religious
leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if
this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren't they interested
in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women,
naive children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise
them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their
families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough
innocent people are dead.

Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair.
The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens
there. There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different
cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone
with
explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly
more despair in Saddam's Iraq then in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no one
exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of
cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human
life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high
regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.

The only way to fight this new "popular" weapon is identical to the
only way in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high seas:
the offensive way.

Like in the case of organized crime, it is crucial that the forces
on the offensive be united and it is crucial to reach the top of the crime
pyramid. You cannot eliminate organized crime by arresting the
little drug dealer in the street corner. You must go after the head of the
"Family." If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it,
many are afraid of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a
miserable childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism.

The United States understands this now, after September 11. Russia
is beginning to understand it. Turkey understands it well. I am very
much afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it.
Unfortunately, it seems that Europe will understand it only after suicide
murders arrive in Europe in a big way. In my humble opinion, this will
definitely happen.

The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning.
The unity of the Civilized World in fighting this horror is absolutely
indispensable. Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be
achieved.

2. The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies.

Words can be lethal. They kill people. It is often said that
politicians, diplomats and perhaps also lawyers and business people must
sometimes lie, as part of their professional life. But the norms of
politics and diplomacy are childish, in comparison with the level of
incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications, which have
reached new heights in the region we are talking about. An incredible
number of people in the Arab world believe that September 11 never happened,
or was an American provocation or, even better, a Jewish plot.

You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad
Said al-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already
inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic.
But to stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous
statements, known to everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed
in your own milieu, can only happen in this region. Mr. Sahaf eventually
became a popular icon as a court jester, but this did not stop some
allegedly respectable newspapers from giving him equal time. It also does
not prevent the Western press from giving credence, every day, even now,
to similar liars. After all, if you want to be an anti-Semite, there are
subtle ways of doing it. You do not have to claim that the holocaust never
happened, and that the Jewish temple in Jerusalem never existed. But
millions of Moslems are told by their leaders that this is the case. When
these same leaders make other statements, the Western media report them as
if they could be true. Con't..........

 

It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and
dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of
western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly believes
them. It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making opposite
statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest of the world.
Incitement by Arab TV, accompanied by horror pictures of mutilated bodies,
has become a powerful weapon of those who lie, distort and want to destroy
everything. Little children are raised on deep hatred and on admiration of
so-called martyrs, and the Western World does not notice it because its own
TV sets are mostly tuned to soap operas and game shows. I recommend to you,
even though most of you do not understand Arabic, to watch Al Jazeera,
from time to time. You will not believe your own eyes.

But words also work in other ways, more subtle. A demonstration in
Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam's regime and featuring three-year
old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the press and by
political leaders as a "peace demonstration". You may support or
oppose the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat or Bin Laden as
peace activists is a bit too much. A woman walks into an Israeli
restaurant in mid-day, eats, observes families with old people and children
eating their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays the bill. She then blows
herself up, killing 20 people, including many children, with heads and arms
rolling around in the restaurant. She is called "martyr" by several Arab
leaders and "activist" by the European press. Dignitaries condemn the act
but visit her bereaved family and the money flows.

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called "the
military wing", the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now
called "the political wing" and the head of the operation is called the
"spiritual leader". There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian
nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by
Western media. These words are much more dangerous than many people
realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It
was Joseph Goebels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people
will believe it. He is now being outperformed by his successors.

3. The third aspect is money.

Huge amounts of money, which could have solved many social problems
in this >dysfunctional part of the world, are channeled into three
concentric spheres supporting death and murder.

In the inner circle are the terrorists themselves. The money funds
their travel, explosives, hideouts and permanent search for soft
vulnerable targets. The inner circles are primarily financed by
terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also by Iraq
and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes. These
states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens of
the wholesale murder vendors.


They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters,
planners, commanders, preachers, all of whom make a living, usually
a very comfortable living, by serving as terror infrastructure.

Finally, we find the third circle of so-called religious,
educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good,
feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new
generation with hatred, lies and ignorance. This circle operates
mostly through mosques, madrasas and other religious establishments
but also through inciting electronic and printed media. It is this
circle that makes sure that women remain inferior, that democracy is
unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is minimal. It is
also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside the
Moslem world for the miseries of the region. The outer circle is
largely financed by Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain
Moslem communities in the United States and Europe and, to a smaller
extent, by donations of European Governments to various NGO's and by
certain United Nations organizations, whose goals may be noble, but
they are infested and exploited by agents of the outer circle. The
Saudi regime, of course, will be the next victim of major terror, when
the inner circle will explode into the outer circle. The Saudis are
beginning to understand it, but they fight the inner circles, while
still financing the infrastructure at the outer circle.

Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which
makes sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle
of terror and incitement, rather than to the world outside. Some parts
of this same outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from,
or blackmail by, the inner circles. The horrifying added factor is the
high birth rate. Half of the population of the Arab world is under the
age of 20, the most receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more
generations of blind hatred.
con't.................

 

Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably
on their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in
Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad
"soldiers" join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hotspots, while
some of their leaders ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in
Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands of dollars per
month from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority, while a typical
local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives
only a cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing
murders at the retail level.

4. The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total
breaking of all laws.

The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law,
including international law, human rights, free speech and free press,
among other liberties. There are naive old-fashioned habits such as
respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and
hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies
and not using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in
history, not even in the **** period, was there such total disregard
of all of the above as we observe now. Every student of political
science debates how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning
a democratic election and abolishing democracy. Other aspects of a
civilized society must also have limitations. Can a policeman open
fire on someone trying to kill him? Can a government listen to phone
conversations of terrorists and drug dealers? Does free speech
protect you when you shout "fire" in a crowded theater? Should there
be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders?

These are the old-fashioned dilemmas. But now we have an entire new
set.

Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition
storage? Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital?
Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests
hostages? Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers
use ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because
one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly?
Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately
behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden
in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately
moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All
of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do
you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be
avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay
in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and
financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in
France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for
the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same,
while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but
continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as
a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain
or France would have done, in such a situation.

The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions
about the rule of law in a totally lawless environment. It is trying to
play ice hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to knock
out a heavyweight boxer by a chess player. In the same way that no
country has a law against cannibals eating its prime minister, because such
an act is unthinkable, international law does not address killers shooting
from hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being protected by their
Government or society. International law does not know how to
handle someone who sends children to throw stones, stands behind them and
shoots with immunity and cannot be arrested because he is sheltered by a
Government. International law does not know how to deal with a
leader of murderers who is royally and comfortably hosted by a country,
which pretends to condemn his acts or just claims to be too weak to arrest
him.

The amazing thing is that all of these crooks demand protection
under international law, and define all those who attack them as "war
criminals," with some Western media repeating the allegations.

The good news is that all of this is temporary, because the
evolution of international law has always adapted itself to reality. The
punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest before the murder,
not during and not after. After every world war, the rules of
international law have changed, and the same will happen after the present
one. But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be done.
con't...........

 

The picture I described here is not pretty. What can we do about
it? In the short run, only fight and win. In the long run - only educate
the next generation and open it to the world. The inner circles can and
must be destroyed by force.

The outer circle cannot be eliminated by force. Here we need
financial starvation of the organizing elite, more power to women, more
education, counter propaganda, boycott whenever feasible and access to
Western media, internet and the international scene. Above all, we need
a total absolute unity and determination of the civilized world against
all three circles of evil. Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my
alleged role as a taxi driver and return to science. When you have a
malignant tumor, you may remove the tumor itself surgically. You may
also starve it by preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts
of the body, thereby preventing new "supplies" from expanding the tumor.
If you want to be sure, it is best to do both.

But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have to
realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more years.
In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the terrorist regimes,
so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these
people.

I do not want to comment here on whether the American led attack on
Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass destruction
or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of
Western Asia.

Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half
terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a
Syrian colony.

Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the
conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally
surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by
Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the
former Soviet Union.

Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a
significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the
terrorist countries. It is not surprising that Iran is so active in
trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq. I do not know if the American
plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the
resulting situation.

In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is
Iran and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and
to expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy
over Western culture. It is ruthless. It has proven that it can execute
elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian
Embassies. It is clearly trying to develop nuclear weapons. Its so-called
moderates and conservatives play their own virtuoso version of the "good-cop
versus bad-cop" game. Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism, it is certainly
behind much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding the Hezbollah and,
through it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it performed acts of
terror at least in Europe and in South America and probably also in
Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a multi-national terror
consortium, which includes, as minor players, Syria, Lebanon and certain
Shiite elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most European countries still trade
with Iran, try to appease it and refuse to read the clear signals.

In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry up the financial
resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to
understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaeda and
Hamas and the Shiite terror of Hezbollah, Sadr and other Iranian inspired
enterprises. When it serves their business needs, all of them
collaborate beautifully.

It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer
circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror. It is
important to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic
organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief organizations
and to react with forceful economic measures to any small sign of financial
aid to any of the three circles of terrorism.

It is also important to act decisively against the campaign of lies
and fabrications and to monitor those Western media who collaborate with
it out of naivety, financial interests or ignorance.

Above all, never surrender to terror. No one will ever know whether
the recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if
not for the train bombings a few days earlier. But it really does not
matter. What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused the
result and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq. The Spanish story
will surely end up being extremely costly to other European countries,
including France, who is now expelling inciting preachers and forbidding
veils and including others who sent troops to Iraq. In the long run, Spain
itself will pay even more.

Is the solution a democratic Arab world?

If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free
speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women,
free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas,
laws against racial incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of
lawless behavior regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then
yes, democracy is the solution.

If democracy is just free elections, it is likely that the most fanatic
regime will be elected, the one whose incitement and fabrications
are the most inflammatory. We have seen it already in Algeria and, to a
certain extent, in Turkey. It will happen again, if the ground is not
prepared very carefully. On the other hand, a certain transition democracy,
as in Jordan, may be a better temporary solution, paving the way for the
real thing, perhaps in the same way that an immediate sudden democracy
did not work in Russia and would not have worked in China.

I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail. But the
longer it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more
costly and painful the victory will be. Europe, more than any other region,
is the key. Its understandable recoil from wars, following the horrors of
World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent lives, before the
tide will turn."

 

Sorry it was so long. :/

 

It was a VERY worthwhile read...thanks!

Scott

 

Long, but a goodie. Thanks for posting that.

Ryan

 

I didn't need to read that to understand there are alot of dysfunctional human beings living in that region.

 

Amen, entirely too long to hold my attention.

 

I read it, the article was well-written. Everything makes sense now, I'm going to become a suicide bomber! I'm going on the offense baby!!!
I wonder if I should blow up my F150 or just run on foot into the crowd???

You won't hear that speech on a conservative or even a liberal western radio or TV show...it wouldn't fit inside the allotted time between commercial breaks. Afterall, Western culture needs diet aids, new cars, and second mortgages more than they need to be aware of anything controversial or important.
Thx for leaving that on the board Mr Moderator.

 

That was interesting. And makes perfect sense.

 

interesting read

 

Could this guy get onto Charlie Rich's program?

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