Lecture at the Australian National University (ANU)
(The Middle East in Arab Eyes)
8 Sept. 2006
Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban:
Thank you Professor Saikal. Thank you so much for having me here. Thank you for ANU University. Thank you all for taking time and energy to come here and I hope that I will not waste your time by coming here.
The title of my talk today to you is “The Middle East in Arab Eyes”. I found it a very attractive title because until few years ago, we really never spoke about the Middle East as Arab People, we only spoke about the Arab World and Arab countries. The Middle East itself is a very new term that was invented in order to ignore the identity of the Arabs and to refer to us only in terms of our geographical place, but if you think of it, what does the Middle East signify? Only geography, but it refers to no History, to no People, to no identity. It only refers to geographical area of where the Arab World is.
I asked the other day a colleague of mine who came from a big origin. I asked does the Middle East also include Spain and Greek and Italy and Syria and Morocco? What we mean by all that? I am making this start only to indicate that I am challenged today that I will be moving, I know, it is much easier to confirm, that it is easier for you and it is easier for me, I had never chosen to go the easy way, I would rather go the difficult way. So, the question I am asking is how much does the world know about the Middle East from an Arab perspective? Is the Middle East as you read about it nowadays presented from an Arab point of view or from another point of view that is undermining the Arabs? Does the media you read represent what is happening to the Arabs or what is happening against the Arabs? What do we know as Arabs about ourselves, about our culture, about history, and what does the world know about us? Does the world see us as Arabs through our history and culture, or through different lenses which are presenting us the way they want to present us? It is perhaps extremely appropriate that I am talking to you ladies and gentlemen on the 11th of September.
Today is the fifth anniversary of 9/11. This anniversary is certainly extremely painful for the United States, for the families of the victims. I would like to assure you that it is extremely painful for all Arabs and Muslims, because for the last five years Arabs and Muslims have paid in immeasurable ways for 9/11. As you all remember we were in front of all our television screens in the first hour or two. There were papers written in Arabic discovered near cars that were used by those who hijacked planes and who did the explosion. There was a Quran discovered somewhere and passports of Arab people.
So, right from the first few hours there were indications where the consequences of 9/11 are going, besides of course the disasters that befell the victims and their families. So, as we are remembering now was brief of what happened in 9/11. I would like to explore with you and to share of you some of my thoughts of what kind of the Middle East this 9/11 made. And what is the place of the Arabs in this new Middle East as they call it after 9/11. I am not going to spend your time rehashing what happened. But I would like to focus on two ideas.
After 9/11 an announcement of war on terror was made by the President of the United States. The first country that was attacked is Afghanistan and the second country that was attacked in Iraq. Although as you all remember, there was no evidence what so ever that Iraq has connection with the terrorists who struck in 9/11. And I think you all agree with me that some of us know here how did 9/11 happened, and who was truly behind 9/11. What was the whole story in 9/11, and who were those people who masterminded. I don’t scare who carried out 9/11 and why. As an Arab woman I think 9/11 was against me, against my country, against my people, against our future, because we have a proverb in Arabic culture that says “you judge things by their consequences” and I think the consequences of 9/11 as I share with you were incredibly against the Arab world, against the Muslim world.
I was in the Security Council four times in February 2003 before the war on Iraq accompanying our Foreign Minister. I attended all the sessions, all the discussions in the Security Council, and no evidence at all either for mass destruction weapons or for the fact that Iraq has any terrorist activity what so ever till the invasion of Iraq took place. It is very easy for us to say that and it is very easy for the Americans to say that the war on Iraq was a mistake or it was not a mistake. They are thousand miles away. But we should listen to the Iraqis and to see what the war on Iraqis means to them and what does the war on Iraq mean to the Arab identity and to the Arab People, from the killing of university professors and as I am here at your renowned university, I should say to you that over three hundred Iraqi professors have been killed since 2000, almost all Iraqi professors have been killed, any renowned doctor, journalist, teacher, professor has been killed in Iraq. There is absolute lack of security and of course we are at the brink of a civil war in Iraq.
There is some who say now there is sectarian division in Iraq. I can tell you that the first time I hear of anything sectarian regarding Iraq is when I heard the Sunni triangle, because despite the fact that we all agree that what Saddam did was criminal towards his people. We were still speaking of one country, and we never heard it Sunni and Shiites and Kurds the way we hear it nowadays coming from the American media. The churches in Iraq were attacked and bombed. We received at least two hundred thousand Iraqi Christians in Syria after the American war on Iraq. If you want to know truly what happened to Iraqi People, there is a new novel which was published by an Iraqi woman who refused to give her name and the novel was published recently in London.
The life of the Iraqi woman is pushed back at least a hundred years ago and I think you could only ask American soldiers whether they dare to ask on the street and buy a sandwich. Their living role in Saddam’s palaces to secure a way from the hell that burns Iraqi women, men and children. So this was the first result of war on terror on Arab identity and of course by having Iraq as an extremely troubled area where the terrorists have a larger state. I don’t want to tell you what is happening in Palestine, I hope you all know what is happening to Gaza and the West Bank. I think the only way I could think about that is a big trail were engaged that Israel opens for a few hours a week or two hours a day, and there Palestinian women, men and children are piled over their suitcases like sheep for the Israeli soldier to allow them in or not to allow them in, to be able to go to a doctor or not.
There is a policy of starving the Palestinian People and this is a deliberate policy that has been carried out by Israeli forces. Yesterday I do not know whether you saw on the news, a twelve-year old boy was killed. And mostly every single day three or four are killed most of them are children. I have my twelve-years old boy with me. I don’t know what I would do if anybody would kill my boy. I don’t know whether I would be a suicide bomber or whether I would do anything to the one who would kill my son, father or daughter, saying that just hopefully to make you putting yourself in the place of what is happening to Arab People in the Middle East.
The latest war, the latest attack on Lebanon, and it was not a war; it was an aggression against Lebanon. At least a thousand people were killed, most of them were children, and at least ten thousand children were maimed and one million people displaced. Schools, airports all have been destroyed. I have some pictures; I will share with you after a little bit, just to show you what you probably did not see through what the world’s media brings to you. And once we talk about the Middle East, most people would say that it is a complicated problem between the Arabs and the Palestinians and the Middle East conflict is very difficult to understand. I would like to briefly say as an Arab woman what is happening in the Middle East that there are the indigenous Arab people, most of them look like me with black eyes and black hair, who have been living there for thousands of years, and there are the settlers who are coming to Palestine to kill the Palestinians, transfer them, kill their children, make them refugees on their land and to take their land.
Now the new reality after 9/11 is that the war on terror has become a war on Arabs and Islam, and any one who fights the occupiers is a terrorist. That is a new addition to the Arab Israeli conflict that is extremely dangerous to our very existence that our children are being killed and we do not dare complain about our children being killed, because he is a terrorist. If he was not a terrorist, democracy would not kill children and would not kill women, civilians but it is absolutely the opposite what we are living through is happening in our region.
I think the crimes that were perpetrated in Lebanon were so terrible that I found it incredible being in Syria during the thirty three days that the world opinion was so quiet. You know I found it unbelievable that somebody like Condoleezza Rice could come to Beirut and see Qana massacre and yet not to have the human feeling to call for a cease fire, not to say that a cease fire is a must and should happen today before one more child is killed. I find it incredible that why people do not feel that these children are children who have parents who feel like any parents in the world who would lose a child killed while being a slave. So it created a very difficult dilemma in our minds. Are the Arabs less human beings than the human beings? Is the killing of the Arabs ok? Is that the result of 9/11 to consider all Arabs terrorists and therefore if there are killed, we are killing terrorists.
I would like to question this idea. Let us assume that the nineteen people who carried out 9/11 are Arabs and Muslims, does that mean that all Arabs and Muslims are terrorists? And does that mean that all Arabs and Muslims should be killed? In my opinion terrorism is a crime. What is the difference between killing somebody in New York or killing somebody on the street of Sydney or killing somebody on the street of Damascus? What we should do all of us is to unite all of us against crimes and against killing innocent people. As a Muslim woman I know and we all know in the Quran that God said killing one innocent human self is equivalent to killing the entire humanity. So how it is allowed the killing of human selves one day after another. In my opinion it is this objective that was set on the war on terror that is unrealistic objective. What is the war on terror? The war on who? Who are the terrorists? Do we fight a war that we don’t know against who? Are we fighting against individuals terrorists? Do we know where they are? This war of terror has increased the polarisation of the world, of Muslims against the West, of the West against Arabs and Islam. Is that intended? Is this the way that it should go? Or is that an unfortunate consequence of the war on terror? And if this is the case, is anybody thinking that we should stop here, otherwise it would be very difficult. So what I am saying for us as Arabs, what is happening in the Middle East is that this is genocide against Arab People. And the war on terror is only creating more extremism, undermining moderate, sectarian people, undermining any possibility that could work between the Western World and the Arab World. In the last attack on Lebanon, if we just state the fact, you know, being an academician, not like a politician, if we just state the fact that of all the Israeli victims, there were only eighteen victims out of about four hundred were civilians. And one day after another the spokesperson of Hezbollah kept trying not to target civilians. The result according to an Israeli newspaper is eighteen Israeli civilians and about four hundred military soldiers. The results on the Lebanese side is over a thousand Lebanese civilians most of them are women and children and about a hundred soldier from Hezbollah and a million people displaced. In the year 2000 when Hezbollah liberated the South of Lebanon, there was not a single Israeli civilian killed, only soldiers, because Hezbollah was only targeting occupiers who occupied the land. Now is the terrorist the one who targets occupying soldiers or is he the one who targets women and children and perpetrates massacre against them?
But as you know from the terminology that prevails nowadays, you only describe an act of being a terrorist act if it is done by an Arab or a Muslim. But if it is done by any other person, if it is a crime or assassination it has another name and not a terrorist act. Only if a Muslim or an Arab did any crime anywhere, so it is a terrorist act, which makes me feel that this term is only named for the Arabs and Muslims as a race and followers of religion, which is certainly unacceptable to most of you. If you allow me I will share with you some pictures of the Lebanese victims and destruction in Lebanon, and I think the media didn’t convey to you what we see in our region.
And I would like then to ask your opinion whether you think this is terrorism or not and then I will do few remarks to my presentation. Now this is a picture of an Israeli girl painting on a missile to Lebanese children with love. This was an extremely popular picture during the war and certainly arrive Lebanon but certainly with no love at all but with destruction to the southern suburb of Beirut. The Italian Foreign Minster said it was Hiroshima when he went there.
It is a picture now of a British soldier who was trained in London to be sent to Iraq and after two months of training they were telling him that he sees a child, he should kill him before asking him because Arab women put suicide belts around their babies and they send their babies to die. The Arab women like their babies to die, they kill their babies.
This picture is a picture that we see every single day on our television screens in the Arab World. Either Iraqi men or Palestinian men are humiliated and kidnapped and sent into the Israeli jails and American jails. I don’t know if you share my feelings when we see our men being blindfolded and rounded up. And this is the only place where people would prefer to die rather that to be in that position. Notice how many babies and children are there. These two babies were massacred in Qana. Thirty five people were massacred out of fifty in Qana Massacre and this was not called terrorism. So I feel that being now on the 11th September, I would like to assure to all of you that the way we Arabs see that the war on terror is a war on Arabs and Muslims. And the most difficult problem that this war created to all of us is that anyone who wants to fight the Israeli occupation is called a terrorist. So a link was made between people who resist occupation and between terrorism. Members of Palestinian Parliament who were elected and I know according to President Carter, the elections were democratic and transparent and not corrupted, and yet members of the Palestinian Parliament are imprisoned in Israeli jails with no condemnation from the Government of the world about this. The link that was made in the minds of people between terrorism as applying to Arabs and Muslims, and between really rounding up Arabs in Palestine and in Iraq, killing their children, occupying their land, stealing their heritage in the name of fighting terrorism.
In this sense as an Arab woman the war on terror in extremely dangerous saying that it is happening to us, to the Arabs, that is making a very dangerous area for all of us. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that now it is the beginning of school in the Arab World. Six thousand children in Iraq are out of school, and two hundred thousand children in Lebanon are out of school. I don’t dare speak about what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. They became so poor and deprived. And yet when you go to Israel as a tourist, they show you how prosperous Israelis are and how backwards the Palestinians are. Of course, if you want to steal their land and build barriers to prevent them from going to school, cut their olive trees, prevent any assistance to reach them. This is the new trend; you cannot even send money to a hospital, because it is considered money that is going to terrorism.
There is an American woman who wrote an article in an American newspapers speaking about the crime of supporting Palestinian charity, because if you want to support any Palestinian charity, you are supporting terrorism. You cannot send money to save a child whose leg is amputated. So I just would like to alarm with you to the danger of classifying Arabs and Muslims as terrorists, and what is happening in the Middle East in the name of fighting terrorism.
The conflict in the Middle East is very simple. I don’t know why it should be linked in one way or another to what happened in 9/11 even if they say that the people were Arabs and Muslims. Demotte was an American who killed about thirty children and about twenty women in an explosion in Oklahoma; does that make us say that Americans are terrorists. In Europe they had fascism and they had Nazism. Did we say that they were Christians?
Actually what is happening in the Middle East is a struggle for land. Palestine is a land of Palestinians. I am not talking of eliminating Israel; I am talking about an Arab initiative that one or two countries had initiated in Lebanon in 2002 to make peace with Israel if Israel would withdraw to the line of 1976. I think this is an excellent solution to all people in the region, but as I see it the policy of the United States and of Israel is to solve the Arab Israel conflict by force, by fighting more wars and occupying more land, by destroying the culture of the Arabs.
We already saw the Palestinian dress featuring in one Israeli exhibit, and I already saw two pieces of our archaeology being exhibited by Israel as Israeli archaeology. For people who say we want to send money and medicine as donations, I say we do not want any money; we just want you to speak out your mind and to say no to killing the Arabs, to say no to occupying land and of accusing all Arabs and Muslims of being terrorists.
It is really difficult to accept what they say that Arab women are sending their babies to death. This means racisms that the Arab women are different from the other women in the rest of the world, or our love for our children is different from all parents all over the world. So, what we need in the Middle East is justice and the most dangerous link that has happened in the last five years is the link between 9/11 and what happened in the Middle East. These are completely two different issues that are really affecting the Arabs. Now I fear for our language, for our history.
The first thing that Israel is destroying is our culture and our archaeology. And this is what has been destroying in Iraq and Palestine. It is really a war on our identity and our integrity. And all the Arab world have been calling to make peace in the Middle East according to the Security Council, according to the international legitimacy, according to just solutions which preserve human integrity and human dignity for all people who suffer from this, most of them are women and children.
It is very easy for us to take shower, dress well and come here, but there are millions of people in the middle East now who are refugees on their own land, who cannot take a bath or a cup of tea or send their children to school, and to come back and accuse them that they are backwards because they are Arabs. No, they are so because they are muffed down to the middle ages in the name of fighting terrorism which I hope will be unacceptable in Australian and every place in the world. The Arabs don’t have the armament to fight this war against a nuclear country like Israel who is supported by the United States as it has sent cluster bombs during this last war, passing through British airports without even notifying the British Government. And now it polluted all the coasts of Lebanon and now it spread to the coasts of Syria, not only they put oil in the water, but they put things which make cancer, extremely spread among citizens.
Yet environment people in the world do not seem objecting to what is happening to our people. So it is a war, it is a starvation war. It is linking who are resisting the occupation with terrorists in order to make killing them permissible in the eyes of the world. All this is being done with strong media campaign that only gives sound life to people and tell them the issue is very complicated and you cannot understand Middle Eastern Politics.
There is history in the West that you can compare to what is happening in the Middle East, indigenous people that are exterminated, settlers taking their land, their water in the name of fighting terrorism. This is what is happening in the Middle East from an Arab eye.
Thank you very much.