Refreshing Reason From Arabia

A female voice of reason resounds from the Middle East. She is a Saudi writer, Nadine Al-Baydar and this aricle of hers is unbelievably refreshing.

“The blood and money of the non-believer is a legitimate target. Some people talk of pious Muslims and describe them as extremists, Islamic separatists, or terrorists. Such talk is an insult to the Muslim faith.”

My brother repeated the above sentences in an attempt to memorize them. Then he said, “How could murder and theft be crimes, yet at the same time be taught in our school’s curriculum?”

I tried to explain to him that we are going through a stage of educational reform, and that it will not be long before expressions such as these are taken out of the curriculum. He asked why, if the study program is to be reformed, must he waste years memorizing its contents?

A few days later, my brother’s teacher asked the class to write a paper on what they think of the curriculum, and my brother pointed out the above-mentioned phrases. The teacher mocked his paper and discarded it, while he paid attention to and praised other papers that discussed the schoolbook’s spelling and grammatical errors. My brother then said to me: “Apparently you didn’t understand that what was actually intended was a linguistic reform!”

On another day, my brother came back from school with a different idea. “Our teacher assures us that America is the enemy and that we have to hate and boycott it,” he said.

I gazed at the walls of his room and asked him: “You want to boycott America like your teacher told you to?” He bobbed his head up and down in agreement. So I said: “Then take down all these posters of famous wrestlers and rock stars, stop wearing your American-style clothes, quit watching their movies, toss out your personal computer, change your Western-inspired haircut, and replace your way of living that is so taken by the American culture with something else…

He immediately interrupted me: “Come on, sis, I was only joking!”

It is not just my brother who is only joking, but it is all Arab peoples who have a bland sense of humor when they declare their hatred for America and their decision to be free of Western culture. That is because there isn’t an Arab or Muslim person who can survive without the products of American culture. And how could they, when Arab nations are to this day nations of consumers and not producers, nations who do nothing to encourage their citizens to be creative, and nations who never created the right environment for innovation.

These are nations whose citizens’ thoughts are filled with a naive pride in the glories of an ancient past. A past that has been written and rewritten in countless books, and made and remade into dozens of historical movies and TV dramas filled with bloody battles that are endlessly repeated, bombarding the sight and hearing of the Arab citizen from cradle to the grave.

These are nations whose vast imagination has woven stories (due to either stupidity or the lack of brains altogether) of an American Zionist conspiracy that aims to destroy their nonexistent power. This is similar to their imaginary amounts of wealth that the West allegedly desires to seize through the colonization of their region. But they have a deep faith that their power will one day be restored to its old, ancient glory, and that they will return to exercise the global role that America is playing today.

Countless thoughts and dreams have wasted precious Arab time, while the realistic Western citizen has been busy implementing feasible plans that contribute to the improvement of his society and to adding the latest theories, discoveries and inventions to the library of world knowledge.

A quick comparison between the products of Arab cinema - with rare exceptions - and their Western counterparts which take into full account that discerning minds will be watching, is enough to reflect the truth of our Arab reality versus the Western reality that we despise.

If we did some research to find out the number of places for entertainment in the Arab world, we would find that it is many orders of magnitude larger than the number of factories or places of learning. The Arab citizen is a hardcore entertainment junky whose brain leans toward intellectual and scientific stagnation. If you were to look for the majority of Arabs in any tourist country, you would only find them sitting in cafes, watching each other and boasting to one another. Some might be found quenching their thirst at the local pub, before returning to the homeland to put on an impersonation of a pious hermit, and start preaching from their holier-than-thou pulpits.

As long as the Arab individual has not yet achieved a level of knowledge and sophistication that would enable him to be selective of what he receives from the outside world, he then is in need of a guide who can steer him in this age of globalization and the blurring of identities, before the waves of civilization throw him on the beach of backwardness, where he would be lost and isolated; or even become extinct.

But you don’t need to cross the seas or spend thousands of Dinars [Saudi currency] to reach the safe harbor of civilization. Civilization is coming to you; it is in your grasp. You can hang on to it and be saved. You can change, free of charge, into a refined human being who deserves to be called “international.” Gone is the age of colonization: The age of globalization is here. This is the truth that the Arabs still reject, insisting on the same old imaginary conspiracy of a Western plan to eradicate Islam.

Did the Arabs lift a finger to help the people of Kosovo when they were suffering from Serbian persecution? They gathered a few donations, but it was America who saved Kosovo. The Arabs did nothing to aid the women of Afghanistan when they were forbidden an education, and when the Afghani people were robbed of the chance for a normal life. America had to come in and rid the region of the backward Taliban regime.

The fear that the Arabs had for the prestige of their governments was more important to them than the injustices that the Iraqis were living under. Not one Arab government condemned the Halabja massacre and the Iraqi loss of life. It was America, and only America, who toppled Saddam’s regime, while the Arabs stood by denouncing the American intervention in Iraq.

Since the inception of the Muslim Brotherhood movement and the emergence of some Islamist countries, we see the Arab women’s conditions gradually deteriorating. The Arab feminist movement was nothing more than theoretical conferences for leading Arab women, where they posed for the cameras and discussed their childhood problems.

Saying that America is targeting the Arabs is a weak and untrue statement: We saw how the U.S. Secretary of State stressed that democracy in Russia had many problems, when she was visiting there a few months ago. It is also well known that the United States had supported the Georgian opposition against the dictatorship there. During the annual session of the Organization of American States this year, Condoleezza Rice emphasized the fragility of democracy in Venezuela and other countries in Latin America.

Many Arabs and Muslims view America as evil. They curse America and hurl insults at it. Some even bomb it and terrorize it. But America doesn’t have the time to curse back; it is too busy finishing the job it came to do in the Middle East.

From Watching America.