Freedom House is a Washington-based think tank. This month, it released its annual freedom survey which covered 194 countries and 14 regions, and which concluded that the Middle East is the world's most repressive region. I have said time and again, and I repeat today, that all Arab countries are undemocratic, and enjoy no freedom of expression, press or assembly, and that there is no independent rule of law in those countries; nor are there any forms of accountability, transparency or women's rights in place there. But unlike Freedom House, the reference point which led me to make a personal judgment of the Arab World is the very fact that I live, breathe and ingest the Middle East every day, and hence do not need any figures and statistics, nor do I need to conduct any arithmetic and number crunching, not to mention the need to arrive at percentages. I am from the Middle East, and my judgment of it was made with an open mind, with open eyes and with a saddened heart. Freedom House, however, should have been instead called “Israel House”, as it claimed that Israel alone is free in the Middle East, compared to 14 countries that it concluded are lacking in freedom, while only three were found to be partly-free. Of course, Israel is only free when it comes to occupying, destroying and displacing women and children, or when it comes to stealing the American taxpayers' money while their country is on the brink of bankruptcy. This is all done with the full complicity of the U.S congress, and the incitement of the infamous Israel lobby and Likudnik neoconservatives. Freedom House thus has no credibility whatsoever in what regards Middle Eastern affairs. In fact, its executive director Thomas Dine was the executive director of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), or the Israel Lobby, between 1980 and 1993. This overlaps with the period of my residence in Washington in the eighties. In this time, AIPAC grew from 24 employees and a budget of $1.4 million to 158 employees and a budget of $15 million. Also, membership climbed from 8,000 to 55,000, which only means that lying on behalf of Israel augmented, all at the expense of America's interests. If we take a look at the names of Freedom House's Board of Trustees, we will find many Jewish names. There is nothing wrong at all with that per se, as some of the best freedom and peace advocates are Jewish, and many of these in turn support the Palestinians every day, while condemning Israel and its crimes. However, after reading the most recent “Freedom in the World” survey, I decided to examine the names of the trustees, where I found names such as Thomas Dine and Kenneth Adelman, the man who spoke of a “cakewalk” in Iraq. I also found names such as Joshua Muravchik, who writes with an almost Israeli undertone about Arabs and Muslims; I do not know what his current nationality is. I then looked up some of the names on the internet, and searched for any material that refer to their line of work. I thus found that Paula Dobriansky is a neoconservative, while Jeffrey Hirschberg is an active member in the Israel Policy Forum. I also found among the names that of Kenneth Juster, who lobbies against the countries and corporations that boycott Israel, and who also denied that any falsification of the premises leading up to the war on Iraq had taken place, both before and after the invasion. In addition, Jay Mazur, a prominent member in one of the most important 53 Jewish American organizations, was also among the trustees. All of the individuals mentioned above are apologists for Israel. While their roles vary in terms of importance and significance, they, in their totality, solely contribute for the furtherance of Israeli interests, and thus, cannot be relied upon in determining the status of freedom in any country. Of course, there are among the trustees a number of moderate members, and from amongst their ranks, I salute Dalia Mogahed, an intelligent activist and a fine human being. However, having this kind of Board of Trustees is like making the best possible salad dish and then spitting in it, as trustees such as Dine, Adelman, and Muravchik are this corrupting spit. Israel's supporters are in line and similar in kind with this state, a state of thieves who robbed the lands of the Palestinians, while claiming them for themselves on the basis of biblical myths that are unfounded in actual history. Since my opinion about Israel is known, I choose today a commentary written by the non-Israeli and non-Arab prominent journalist John Pilger, entitled “For Israel, a Reckoning”, published in conjunction with Freedom House's so-called survey. In the article, Pilger wrote about the Palestinian resistance to the theft of their country, and how their struggle reached a critical moment in 2001 when Israel was identified as an apartheid state at the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, which was also proven by the Goldstone report this year. He then talked about how churches began to boycott Israel after that, while prohibiting business with Israel. He also mentioned that the Presbyterian Church voted with a majority of 431 votes to 61, and adopted a resolution to boycott Israel. The article then also mentions the British academic boycott of Israel, and a similar campaign that is currently underway in American universities. This article is very much worth translating into Arabic, and the writer deserves credit for his objectivity. Israel is a state that can never be free. It is a self-proclaimed Jewish state, which is something that denies its native inhabitants any form of equality. This is all while Israel commits every other crime in the book, and then Freedom House decides to turn a blind eye to all of this. [email protected]
