Madline and I Indications Signals from Dubai

By Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban

During the Strategy Forum “the Region in 2020” held in Dubai, I was in one session with the American ex-secretary of state, Ms. Madeline Albright, with whom I share mutual liking and respect. Stepping down from the stage at the end of the session, she whispered to me “you were tough.” To my mind that meant one of two things, either that I was tough with to her or that I was tough with the United States. Both caught up in the midst of curious journalists, I couldn’t talk to Ms. Albright till the next morning when we met over breakfast.

During that session, I mentioned that Arabs and Muslims in the United States and Europe are faced with attitudes that verge on being racist, as they find themselves being accused of terrorism just by virtue of the color of their skin or their name or religion. Almost the same kind of racist attitudes they suffer in Palestine and Iraq, those two countries where the world has lost count and names of Arab victims. Instead, media blackout is willingly imposed on the crimes committed against them.

I asked Ms. Albright how banning the media from Faluja and some other places could conform to freedom of the press, one of the pillars of democracy. I then suggested adopting a strategy that isolates extremists of all religions and ethnicities, and that forms an alliance between the East and West and between the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds that is based on parity of dignity, justice, and equality between all humans regardless of their religion, race or color.

Ms. Albright started off breakfast by expressing surprise over what I said of the United States discriminating against Arabs and Muslims, and more surprise over the passionate applauding response from the audience. She said that it pained her a lot to see that the United States, with all the values it stands for, has become target to the anger and hatred of those people. I replied by wondering how she would describe accusing or suspecting someone of being a terrorist just because he or she are brown in color and have an Arabic name. I wondered what we could call such an attitude. I said that the difference in feelings between herself and the audience was that she didn’t see what the policies and armies of the United States have brought around of occupation, humiliation, killing and destruction. However, and in all cases, our aim is to correct this course of action that is leading towards confrontation between civilizations.

If we don’t speak with absolute frankness, and if we don’t point right to the wound, we wouldn’t be able –all of us together- to reset this course on the right direction. This can be achieved by isolating advocates of violence and terrorism, and by applying international law and the principles of justice, dignity and freedom for all humans wherever and whoever they were.

I was rather taken aback by this experience, and even more so by the discussions I had with the media. I came out with two things: first that what I said was considered daring. This is in spite of the fact that I didn’t even talk about the suffering of our people nor of their daily subjugation to destruction, occupation, and war crimes under the name of “incursions,” and to extermination war called “raids,” and to collective punishment that violates all international laws and is named “international sanctions.”

The other thing is that the comparisons being made with naivety or malevolence between the crimes presently committed and the crimes that Saddam committed in the past is unacceptable. This is simply because the declared war aim of the United States was to liberate the Iraqis tyranny of the Saddam regime. Furthermore, beheadings and kidnapping foreigners is as ugly as the destruction of houses on top of their inhabitants, bombing a safe city, and killing scientists and university professors. All are crimes and acts of terrorism. The important thing that this experience revealed to me is  the extent to which anti-Arab racists have control over the western media which has deprived Western citizen and politician alike from truth, photos and news about the actual reality of the criminal practices condemned by all peoples, cultures and religions.

Only two days after this experience in Dubai, a study was released by the RAND corporation in the US. It considered the prevalent thinking among Muslims of non-Arab descent to be politically more inclusive, progressive and secular than that of their counterparts in Arab countries. If this was not racist, I no longer know what the word “racism” means. This study has judged millions of Muslim Arabs to be less progressive and less secular than non-Arab Muslims just by virtue of being Arab. Is this not but a dictionary definition of “racism”? The RAND study calls for a Muslim (non-Arab) alliance with the West to fight terrorism, just to place Arabs in the rank of terrorism-supporters. The study, obviously, has not taken into consideration the fact that Americans and Arabs alike were the real victims of September 11, for it has been used as a pretext to occupy Arab countries, kill their children, destroy their houses, bulldoze their lands, and create new settlements in Palestine and the Golan Heights, and spread chaos in Iraq, and squander its history, kill its scientists and intellectuals, threaten Sudan and Syrian and Lebanon to the degree that we have no right to think sometimes that the real aim behind September 11 was to exterminate Arabs, their lands, culture, history, role and national and international existence.

The publishing of this RAND study coincided with two other pieces of news, the first was that a committee of the British House of Lords have deemed illegitimate the detention of foreigners –often Arabs- in Britain by the police under the law of combating terrorism with no valid accusations. The committee also considered such detention to contradict the principles of democracy, and human rights. This of course also applies to prisoners in Guantanamo and other American, European and Israeli prisons inside their territories or outside in occupied countries such as Abu Gharib and other similar prisons. Charles Clark, Britain’s new minister of interior, however, still refused to release nine of those whom they called “extremists.” This is in spite of the fact that they won appeal suit in front of the Committee of Laws in the Council of Lords.

I bring this up as an example of how the laws of democracy that the West applies to its citizens are no longer applicable to those same citizens if they were of Arab or Muslim descent. That is, an Arab or Muslim origin will subjugate a western citizen to racist practices that stand in contradiction with all that we hear about human rights, democracy, and independence of the  judiciary, regardless of the former pronouncement coming from the highest judiciary body in the country.

With this we also read about how both France and the United States have banned Manar satellite channel from broadcasting, just because it has criticized the Israeli government. We also read about how the United States government has prevented the release of the third Arab Human Development Report that was due last October. This is just because the Bush administration has found in its introduction strong criticism of the American invasion of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of lands. This is even though the  introduction represents only 10% of the report. The Bush team insists, according to Thomas Freidman, on “changing the language that criticizes the US and Israel.”

Such is the nature of this era my friend Madeline; an era for the governments of the US and Israel and any other country to practice the worst kinds of propaganda and racism against Arabs, while the media, and any other information resource, is prohibited from talking about it. This is where my “toughness” came from.

I know that Ms. Albright and many other western citizens would not approve of what Arabs and Muslims are suffering of racist crimes, had they known of it. I, however, was so happy with the pulsation that emanated from the Arabs in the audience, whose danger was obviously felt by the westerners. I also was so happy with their energy as they gathered to listen to Marcel Khalifeh, whose nationalistic songs filled the place with optimism and life.

Once again, after Rabat, I felt in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and before that in Beirut that the heart of Arab identity is still pulsating with goodness. I was once again reassured of the core truth that we need to open other channels that communicate to the world Arab voice and the true picture of what the Arabs are facing. We all have to talk with daring and transparency on every occasion, and we should call things by their true names so that we could serve our cause with the competence and caution demanded from each and everyone of us, as we are all in one boat called “humanity”.