Home >> Middle East >> Arab World

     Email   Print 

Duplicity of Political Agendas: Arab Leaders Exposed

Nizar Awad - 8/1/2011

Arab masses who have had enough of their leaders’ burdensome encroachment on their lives and livelihoods are finally saying to them enough is enough.

They are saying to them in their mass demonstrations and military confrontations that they have shown themselves to be a punch of untrustworthy despots who could no longer be tolerated and therefore they should leave and not only in Arabic (إِرْحَلْ / irhal) but also in French (dégagé) and in English (get out). Most of these leaders past and present have unabashedly hijacked the sacrifices of the independence generation and then proceeded to rule in ways reminiscent of pre-independence times if not worse. Whenever their dishonesty, ineptness and authoritarianism are exposed they would never fail to point the fingers at Israel, America, Europe not to mention mischievous supernatural forces and unruly Jinns (genies) as the culprits. Let us not forget that Colonel Gathafi who is now orchestrating the onslaught on his people had one of his propagandists named Yusuf Shakir and on national TV enlist the help of willing jinns to launch concerted attacks on Turkey, Qatar, England, France and even the United States of America. However for the sake of fairness Arab leaders and I mean Arab presidents have enriched the world political lexicons by introducing the term hereditary presidency and creating innovative ways to win multiple terms as presidents with unprecedented 99.9% of the votes in some cases.

These politically illiterate caretakers (awliya’ al-Umur in Arabic) believe that they can do no wrong nor blame themselves for their failures and atrocities but instead they in an apparently perfect coordination continue to blame Israel, the United States of America, Europe and just for good measure al-Qaeda affiliates are thrown into the mix as well. These two faced leaders never fail in their rhetoric to place most of the blame for their shortcomings squarely on Israel, Europe and the USA but they in fact have only themselves to blame. As a matter of fact many of these rulers and their regimes continually fill our ears with tales of their patriotism and tenacity in standing up to Israel and the West and yet these same leaders have secretly been cultivating strong relationships and even establishing alliances with these very countries. One proof of that is what has recently been reported on Israel’s Channel 2 News about a meeting in Israel between a Gathafi envoy and the Israeli Leftist opposition leader Tzipi Livni during which he reportedly handed her a magnetic disc (digital media) containing a message from Gathafi most likely asking for help to stay in power. This same so called formidable Arab patriot by his hoodwinked supporters has been assaulting our ears with his anti-Israel and anti-western rants for the past forty two years.

This is just one example of the many double standards that these leaders have been exercising to prolong their rules. While their clandestine, unethical and self-serving foreign policies have done enormous disservice if not outright betrayal to the Arab people who put their trust in them, these leaders’ domestic policies have institutionalized corruptions, blatantly violated their people’s human rights and even caused massive death and destruction, and guess what? The culprits of such violations and atrocities or their descendents continued to rule unrepentant afterwards. What President Bashar al-Assad is doing in Syria including the repression of his people by his army and security forces is in fact a continuation of his father Hafiz al-Assad’s legacy. When the city of Hama revolted in February 1982 Hafiz al-Assad and his younger brother Rifa’at al-Assad did not hesitate for a moment to send the army and air force which resulted in leveling the city to the ground and killing what was estimated to be between 10,000 to 40,000 thousands of the city’s inhabitants. While the Syrian regime committed and continues to commit atrocities against its citizens it has been gradually absolving itself of any responsibility for losing the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967 when Hafiz al-Assad was president. Nowadays while any casual observer could see that the Syrian people are the ones revolting against the regime its propaganda machine is blatantly telling us that the revolutionaries are either foreign mercenaries and agents or insurgents belonging to al-Qaeda. Go figure!

While the Egyptian regimes of the late Anwar Sadat and the deposed Hosni Mubarak assisted Israel in the siege of the Palestinian Gaza Strip, the army and security forces of the Saudi regime had finally gotten the chance to flex their muscles by their impressive blitzkrieg into Bahrain to suppress the Bahrainis’ February 14th Revolution. Along with continuing to prop up the lingering regime of President Ali Abdullah Salih the Saudi Monarchy is sparing no effort to suppress the Yemeni January 27th Revolution. While the Saudi regime has made no bones about making peace overtures to Israel along with being tight with the West now that Iran replaced Israel as the monarchy’s mortal foe, the Yamense President Ali Abdullah Salih is known to throw few jabs at the Jewish State or the West every now and then just for kicks or to remind his people that he carries some weight on the international stage and not just around his waist. What nowadays appear on the surface to be a lull in the revolutionary march across the Arab World is not necessarily so. Arab regimes that have ridden the revolutionary wave this time won’t be so lucky next time. Arabs who had put up with the arrogance and tiresome double entendres of their leaders for so long have had enough and would no longer settle for cosmetic changes being peddled by their regimes be they republics or monarchies. Their proposed reforms to temporarily assuage the anger of their masses are not doing the trick. Unless such reforms are genuine and do indeed satisfy the demands of Arab protesters, they won’t pass muster but they would instead exasperate already tense situations in many of these countries.