<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Racist Subjectivity and Intellectual&nbsp;Dishonesty]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<table border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1" width="100%" align="center">
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<td class="normal_text" style="padding-left:15px;" align="right">20:18 02/15/2011</td>
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<td class="caption_text" align="center">It is as if prospect of democratic Egypt is prelude to Armageddon. (Aljazeera)</td>
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<td class="normal_text" style="padding-top:10px;"><strong>By Mohamed El Mokhtar</strong></p>
<p>It  felt sometimes quite depressing, and indeed demeaning, to be an Arab,  living or going to school in America, during the Second Intifada, and  hear ad nauseum the same old refrain chanted every minute in every  media, at work, on campus: “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle  East, Israel this, Israel that..!”. It is all the more insulting that,  besides being quite inaccurate to a large extent, it is, inherently,  dishonest to say the least. It is, also, primarily meant to hurt some  more than to extol others. This is certainly the case when coming out of  the mouth of openly racist and cynically biased pundits like the  O’Reillys, the Cavutos, or the Blitzers of this world, and the many  spins doctors to whom they give, on a daily basis,  a free platform to  air their one-sided and unchallenged view of the Arab-Israeli conflict  or the Muslim world.</p>
<p>Now that the tide of history is, at last,  returning against the current of stereotypes they helped build and  promote over the years, turning upside down the mountains of perceived  ideas and racist assumptions they, thus, compiled all along, there seems  to be a paradigm shift, not in the sense of a change of heart but in  the direction of a modification of tactic or, more exactly, a refinement  of rationale.</p>
<p>As many decent and freedom-loving people celebrate  everywhere in the world the long-awaited popular uprisings against  tyranny in Tunisia and Egypt, there are some though, within certain  influential Western political circles and media elites, who seem quite  unhappy at the prospect of a democratic Tunisia, and above all, Egypt;  hence, the baseless ratiocinations of Allan Dershowitz, Charles  Krauthammer, Zuckerman et al.</p>
<p>It is as though the prospect of a  democratic Egypt is nothing but a grim omen and a prelude to Armageddon  when listening to the laborious explanations of these  pseudo-intellectuals so tirelessly omnipresent in the media. A  democratic Egypt is such an inacceptable perspective for it is an  existential threat to that sinless Olympian citadel called Israel. That  is the thinly disguised argument!</p>
<p>The same senseless assumptions  are being promoted, albeit in a more sophisticated fashion, in France by  figures like Bernard Henry Levy, Alain Finkielkrault, André Glucksmann  or Alexander Adler. Like their American colleagues, these French  intellectuals and journalists seem rather emotionally disturbed these  days. The idea of a democratic transformation of Egypt seems just so  unbearable to them. It is such a potential threat that it ought to be  prevented by any means!</p>
<p>In the conservative French newspaper Le  Figaro of Jan 29 and 30, Alexander Alder is the first to sound the alarm  in a vitriolic op-ed titled: “Towards a Fundamentalist Dictatorship in  Cairo?” where he describes Mohamed El Baradei , one of the leading  opponents to Mubarak’s regime, as  a “ polymorphous perverse”, nothing  less. Outright imprecation and smear proposed to readers as “rational  opinion”! How disgusting!</p>
<p>Following Alder’s pernicious lead,  Alain Finkielkraut writes in Liberation of Feb 3 a column in which he  asks, rather crudely and without nuance, if El Baradei will “be the  right man of the democratic transition or the useful moron of  Islamism?”, and concludes authoritatively that the democratization of  Egypt is not possible due to the overwhelming presence of the Muslim  Brothers in that presumably backward society. He goes even further to  remind us, erroneously shall I underscore, that unlike Eastern Europe  there is no tradition of democracy in Egypt to speak of.</p>
<p>It is  all the more false and perfidious that Egyptian parliamentarian practice  dates back to the nineteen century and in all of Eastern Europe only  Czechoslovakia had a real tradition of democracy before the constitution  of the Eastern bloc. Besides, how can one demand that there be a  democratic precedent or a tradition of democracy in a society trying  precisely to overthrow a dictatorship and free itself from despotism?  How stupid and cynical!</p>
<p>In the magazine le point with a cover  insidiously titled “The Islamic Specter”, Bernard Henry Levy learnedly  convey his deep concerns and anxiety about the possibility of Muslim  fundamentalists taking advantage of the fall of Mubarak. Embellished  with a better prose, his insinuations relay, nonetheless, the same empty  stereotypes given here and there.</p>
<p>What is, alas, quite striking  and morally disgraceful, in all of these ramblings, is a sad and an  undeniable fact: these supposedly towering intellectual figures are,  unfortunately, all Jews; and we’ve all got, already, used to hearing  them, unashamedly, rationalizing the most basic and extremist views of  the far right in Israel. Can there be any essentializing and racialist  intellectual endeavor than this one? The ghettoized ideological  insularity and ethnocentric provincialism of these intellectuals deeply  inhibit their ability to think critically, much less reflect with  lucidity; hence their deep-seated subjectivity and, quite frankly,  outright hypocrisy.</p>
<p>Here is one example of their sickening  tendency toward manipulation and bias: to help them in their  communications and propaganda effort to intoxicate further the French  public, they called for a special back-up from the US, a taskforce  professionally trained in the art of intoxicating minds. It is Daniel  Pipes. They introduced him to media pundits, newspapers and TV channels  as though he was some kind of an authoritative scholar of the Arab and  Muslim world.</p>
<p>What is ironic, as Pascal Boniface aptly put it, is  the fact these “intellectuals” have complained so often about the lack  of democratic regimes in the Arab world and now that there may be a  change in perspective they feel so deeply concerned and visibly  depressed. In 10 days, wolf Blitzer of CNN has gained ten years in age  and lost more in pounds!</p>
<p>Besides, putting to rest the old refrain  “Israel is the only democracy in the region’’, the new change will,  perhaps, likely mean the establishment of less accommodating regimes  when it comes to Israel unconstrained policies of dispossession and  subjugation of Palestinians. Therein lies the source of their main  concern.</p>
<p>Even a Muslim Brothers-dominated government in Egypt  will very unlikely jeopardize the peace agreements with Israel, much  less go to war for many reasons the least which are the many  socio-economic challenges facing the country and the imbalance of powers  already existing in the region. But it is very likely though that a  truly representative Egyptian government will use its logistical  capabilities and political leverage to alleviate the sufferings of the  Palestinian. Is that perspective such a big deal?</p>
<p>They all flex  their neurons in trying to make the flawed parallel of what is going on  in Egypt now with the precedent of the Iranian revolution forgetting, en  bloc, the socio-historical circumstances of the time as well as their  geopolitical context. The mullahs shut off their society in part because  of the specter of foreign intervention (the precedent of Mossadegh) and  that of an immediate threat: Iraq. Therefore, the existence of a real  outside threat- the Iraqi aggression with the support of the Arabs and  the West-, undoubtedly played a critical role in the devious evolution  of the Iranian revolution. It is very clear to understand!</p>
<p>Furthermore,  the Shaas party is an openly religious and racist party but its  presence in the current government alongside the secular, and no less  racist, Israel Beitouna, doesn’t seem to raise the eyebrows of any of  these liberal-inspired philosophers who always lust lecturing Arabs  about the virtues of liberal democracy.</p>
<p>In conclusion, it seems  that the criteria upon which the democratization of the Arab world is  being measured by some in the West is not necessarily the inalienable  universal rights of peoples to self-determination but the paranoiac  whims of a tiny foreign state that illegally occupies Arab lands and  refuses, against all odds, any type of reasonable political comprise.  Arabs have only conditional political rights and if they elect Islamists  or oppose Israel they automatically forfeit those limited rights. Thus,  they have to be paternalistically told who to elect and when. That type  of crude racism is only permissible when directed at Arabs. Could  Krauthammer or Dershowitz dare today question the maturity of  south-African blacks for democracy? I bet they cannot!</p>
<p>Finally,  isn’t somewhat odd that a small state born little over half-century ago,  made up of the uprooted remnants of various wandering, and longtime  ostracized, tribes is entitled to human rights that a great people of a  far more ancient and glorious nation, Egypt, are not supposed to  naturally enjoy?</p>
<p>I think it is just one more proof of the ugly game of double standards at play here!</p>
<p><em>&#8211; Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba is a political analyst. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.</em></td>
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<p><a href="http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=16655">Racist Subjectivity and Intellectual Dishonesty</a>.</p>
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