Gingrich and Arab Spring for America | ||
Gingrich and Arab Spring for America Who Is Inventing, Newt? Aijaz Zaka Syedi When you stand upside down on your head, the world looks upturned too. So it's just as well that US presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich thinks the Palestinians are an 'invented people.' He told the US Jewish Channel: 'I think we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. They had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel since the 1940s, and it's tragic.' Gingrich’s pearls of wisdom have stunned even those who have long been used to the lopsided nature of US politics and the hostility with which the Arabs and Palestinians are viewed by the US establishment. You wouldn’t take these views seriously if it wasn’t for the fact that Gingrich is not just any US politician playing to his part of the gallery but a former speaker of House of Representatives and Republican frontrunner for the White House. He could face President Obama in next year’s polls and, if elected, could end up in the most powerful office on the planet. Compared to Gingrich, George W Bush comes across as the apostle of peace and very epitome of sweet reason. This dangerous disconnect with reality is not an exception but the norm. Gingrich represents the larger reality of US politics. While over the past few years, the world at large has rallied behind the Palestinians and is increasingly outraged by the suffering and persecution of the dispossessed people, American politicians are outdoing each other in genuflecting before Israel and sanctioning the crimes of an evil, Apartheid state. So while the world community stands up and cheers for a Palestinian state at the United Nations, the Nobel laureate US president threatens to block it. And a vindictive Congress votes to block humanitarian aid to a long besieged and starving people. But then what do you expect from those who have a long history of beating into submission, or worse, obliterating the indigenous people and cultures wherever they headed? The native Americans, or red Indians, are to be found today only in isolated protected sanctuaries in their own land. Tens of thousands of lives were wiped out as part of the West’s glorious mission to spread sweetness and light in Americas. History repeated itself in Australia. The Aborigines have been confined to their wretched habitats in the outback where they are fighting for survival. And who could forget the centuries of colonial games in Africa? The fabled riches of the continent where human civilization is said to have begun finance the empire and its people enslaved for four centuries, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Africans who were captured and sent to build the ‘new world.’ No wonder Gingrich and his kind see the Palestinians as an “invented people.” They are just as invented as the native Americans and Australian aborigines are. Driven out of their homes and lands six decades ago, Palestinians have been desperately looking for an identity and a home to call their own. People like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, born thousands of miles away in Russia, Europe and America seem to have an inalienable right to steal their country and build their homes and colonies where their own homes, mosques, churches and olive trees once stood. And it’s only natural that defying all reason and world opinion, the neocons and bigots like Gingrich should support Israel and its crimes against the Palestinians. After all, Israel is an imperial project. Created as the last colonial outpost in the heart of the Islamic world by the World War II victors – Churchill is said to have famously scrawled the map of a “new Middle East” on a napkin during his summit with Roosevelt and Stalin at the Black Sea resort of Yalta – Israel has been the blight and bane of the region. Imagine the consequences if Gingrich, who has a long history of Islam-bashing had accused the Jews of being an “invented people.” He would have been hit so hard by the almighty lobby that he wouldn’t remember his German-English-Scottish-Irish ancestry. Will this ever change? At a time when the Middle East, long lectured by America and the West on virtues of freedom and democracy, is increasingly breaking free of its shackles and chains, throwing one tyrant after another, the land of the free is hardening its own. The nation of Jefferson, Lincoln and Martin Luther King has been reduced to Israel’s cheerleader. As Friedman puts it in rare candor, America’s role today is to “just applaud whatever Israel does, serve as its ATM and shut up. We have no interests of our own.” When will this reality dawn on the ordinary Americans? When will America break free of the shackles of lobbies and special interests? When will the Arab spring come to America? Aijaz Zaka Syedi writes for PalestineChronicle.com. Newt Gingrich and Invention Sherri Muzher In the wake of Newt Gingrich’s ridiculous comments about Palestinians being an “invented” people I’d like to make a recommendation: Newt, before making historically inaccurate statements, please go read up on Middle East history. Palestinians strongly began to assert their Palestinian identity as far back as the 1930s. The following is a noteworthy excerpt from Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal’s 1993 book, Palestinians: The Making of a People: Palestinism meant the assertion of Palestine as a common homeland at a time when political boundaries were new and still quite uncertain. After a brief flirtation with the notion of their incorporation into Syria, the new organizations began to proclaim emphatically the existence of a distinct Arab people in Palestine. Even when some adopted pan-Arab programs, they took care to distinguish Palestine’s Arabs from those outside the country and, of course, from the Jews and British within. . . . While their members most often came from the more privileged sectors of Arab urban society, the clubs hammered out social demarcations---a Palestinian profile---that also became increasingly appealing to ordinary workers facing the quandaries of urban life. The reality is that every Arab has a specific heritage, be it Palestinian, Lebanese, Algerian, etc. Think of Latin America, where they all speak the same language (Spanish, except in Portuguese-speaking Brazil) and most share the same religion (Roman Catholic). In the Arab world, they all speak Arabic and most are Muslim. Nonetheless, each country has its own dialect, foods, and customs. Mexicans and Argentines differ, as do Palestinians and Egyptians. And within each Arab nation, there is even more diversity -- from distinguishable dialects and expressions to once being able to identify the region a Palestinian woman came from by the intricate embroidery on her traditional dress. In a nutshell, Palestinians have always had a rich and vibrant culture that is all their own. Besides, weren’t the Scandinavians once called the Vikings and the Iraqis once called the Mesopotamians? That never changed the future national identities they would later assume. Modern-day Palestinians are indigenous inhabitants of the Holy Land, and this reality can never change no matter how “inconvenient” the existence of Palestinians is to the narrative of others. It’s been saidthat “The Greatest Enemy of Knowledge is Not Ignorance; It is the ILLUSION of Knowledge.” | ||
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