We did not need to see the Israelis murdering the peace activists in international waters to realize that Israel is a criminal state. This is because Israel can be summed up in its entirety by one word: ‘crime'. Also, the Israelis' dominant feature is that they are thieves who have been stealing the land from its original owners since 1948. On the other side facing the criminal state and the thieving people, how can we describe Arab countries and their peoples? The Arab states are a failure and their peoples are ignorant. There are many other adjectives that would be spot on, but the governments' failure and popular ignorance are sufficient. I will leave the governments to drink from the chalice of their failure, because I cannot say anything that will make them succeed and hence, I will focus on people and ignorance. We want political opposition in every Arab country, since dissent is a sanctioned right in true democratic practice. However, I find that there are very few enlightened figures that understand and practice the methods of dissent, and who deserve to rule, while there is a dominant majority characterized by overwhelming ignorance. On the 13th of last month, I wrote in this column about an Israeli extremist who published an article comprising ten points that prove, in his opinion, the existence of a strategic alliance between Egypt and Israel. Perhaps I would have ignored him were it not for the fact that the Israeli politician Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had beaten him to it when he said that President Hosni Mubarak is a ‘strategic treasure' for Israel, and also were it not for many other Israelis and American Likudniks that focused on the close relationship between the Egyptian president and the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, as evident from their four meetings. Some in the Egyptian opposition take the Israeli allegations as though they are divine revelation, because they suit their inclinations. They have thus become themselves the strategic ally and a treasure for Israel that promotes the latter's policies and strikes with its sword, blinded by ignorance from seeing who put that sword in their hands in the first place. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer has always represented the right wing of the Israeli Labour Party. In Egypt, he is accused of killing 250 Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1967 war in Sinai, as elaborated by an Israeli television program in the aftermath of which Ben-Eliezer became wanted by the Egyptian judiciary for war crimes. The Israeli newspapers said that the Egyptian intelligence advised him not to visit Egypt for fear that he might be arrested at a court order. (He also planned the invasion of Lebanon in 1982) This extremist is promoting a lie about Hosni Mubarak that belongs to black Goebbelsian journalism, and then Egyptian dissenters whose sons and brethren were killed by Ben-Eliezer accept it because it suits their inclinations, and fail to see that the man behind the lie, after killing Egyptians with his own two hands, is trying to push the Egyptians into killing one another. My article on May 13 was about Guy Bechor and his ten points that ‘prove' the existence of a strategic alliance between the Egyptian and Israeli governments. I rebutted each point and explained how none of them proves the existence of this alleged alliance. However, I received many letters from Egyptian readers sympathetic to the opposition, from the ignorant and blind kind, which support Bechor and his opinion. Bechor is an extremist right-wing self-styled expert on Islam and Arab affairs. The reader does not need to do anything other than examine some of his published articles or ‘google' them to know that the man in question is an enemy of Arabs and Muslims. Even more so than this, Bechor, a few days after my article about him, put any questions about the above to rest when he organized an Israeli counter-flotilla to confront the peace flotilla, to intercept it in international waters and yet, Egyptian dissenters chose to take him as a credible ally. I accuse every Egyptian dissenter who accepted Ben-Eliezer's or Bechor's opinion to be himself a strategic ally of Egypt's enemies, while I know for certain that such a dissenter is motivated by ignorance and not ill-will towards his country. There is a constant point when I write about Arab governments, which is that they are all undemocratic, and that there are no independent rule of law, accountability, transparency or full rights for women [in all Arab countries]. What ensues is that I hope that there will be opposition in every Arab country, as it is the sine qua non condition of true democratic practice. I also hope that opposition will come to rule through true democratic methods, and not through the fake democracy that many Arab governments claim for themselves. However, I am drawing an illusory line, neither red, green or in the sand, between dissent as a right, and even as a duty, and blind dissent to the point of being complicit with a known enemy, while the dissenter is definitely against this enemy, but is ignorantly on the latter's side. I have another example, which is an article entitled ‘Exodus from Dictatorship' by Ellen Bork, in which she incites the U.S administration against President Mubarak. Bork was a deputy project manager at the Project for the New American Century which brought together Likudnik American leaders. Those incited the Clinton administration to invade Iraq and failed, but then they succeeded with the Bush administration, and became complicit in the murder of one million Iraqis and five thousand American youths in the service of Israel. Bork's article was published in the Weekly Standard, a mouthpiece for the neoconservatives. The writer also publishes her views in the Wall Street Journal, where the op-ed section is purely Likudnik. From what I know about the writer and her stances against Arabs and Muslims, I am drawn to reject her article even before reading it and then after doing so. I would understand if the Arab dissenter does not know Ellen Bork and her policies, but it is his duty to know the Israelis lurking at the borders with his country, and to not let his ignorance push him towards colluding with them. [email protected]
