From: Zeyhilel@aol.com
Date: Thu Jan 22 2009 - 04:19:53 EST
Selam Dehaiers,
What a stupid proposition. Martin Luther King was operating in a theater
where
armed struggle was an impossibility and where a super power had the added
burden of selling itself to the rest of the world as a democratic country of
laws
and thus had to operate with transparency and utmost civility and restraint.
But
the Palestinians and Arabs are faced with a rogue country that practices the
crudest form of Hamurabi Laws of Revenge and cruelty, The Palestinian people
have no choice but to continue their armed struggle until the Zionists come
to
their senses and capitulate. The Martin Luther King or the Gandhi approach
of non-
violent dissent has no place in Natanyahu's Israel. If they were to see such
a weakness
in the Arabs, the next thing that would come to the mind of those greedy
Zionists
would be to get rid of all Palestinians from Gaza and West Bank.
Martin Luther King movement was only fighting for some basic human rights
for his
people, while the Palestinians (and the Iraqis) are fighting to get rid of a
foreign
occupation army from their land. The two struggles are very fundamentally
different.
Zeyhilel
“Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's
opinion is the best proof of stupidity.”...
.............. Michel de Montaigne
Anger Management
If they want help from Obama, Arabs in the Middle East should learn the
lessons of Martin Luther King.
Christopher Dickey
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Martin Luther King Day is celebrated. Barack Hussein Obama is inaugurated.
The confluence of dates at the beginning of this week seems a culmination of
hopes from the past, an auspicious omen for those with even greater hopes for
the future. And in a general sense among Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East
(whose satellite channels delight in using the new president's middle name)
there is a shared sense of new possibilities opening up. This, even though
their attention—their fear, their anger—has been focused on the carnage in
Gaza these last three weeks.
What the vast majority of Arabs have been slow to realize, however, is the
profound connection that exists between the history of the struggle that
opened the way for Obama to become president, and the future of their own fight
for freedom and dignity, and not only in the face of Israeli occupation, but
under the tyrannies of so many Arab dictators. We talk about remembering Martin
Luther King because of the power of his vision, of his language, of his
morality and of his faith. But mainly we remember him because he adopted a
strategy of nonviolent confrontation with an insidious and pervasive system of
repression—and broke it—and broke through it. We remember him because his way
worked.
What we know about the Middle East today is that wars no longer end in
victories, and the process of peace never delivers more than the process itself. A
new approach has to be found, and the leaders of the governments in the
region don't seem up to the task. The most promising is nonviolent resistance:
mass protests, boycotts, refusal to obey unjust laws.
Again, consider what we are seeing on the Mall in Washington today. As we
look at that enormous crowd we do not, unless we are interested in the
footnotes of modern American history, remember apostles of the gun like Eldridge
Cleaver or Huey Newton or Stokely Carmichael or the rioters shouting "burn baby
burn" as America's cities—their own homes—went up in flames in the 1960s.
Violence drew attention to the civil-rights movement. It expressed the anger
that had built up for years. That is unquestionable. But what it did to advance
the cause of building a new world with new ideas, if anything, is hard to
measure. What King's strategy of nonviolent resistance achieved is
unquestionable: just about everything we are looking at now.
White Americans did not need to be taught to fear black Americans, after
all. Jailers, deep down, will always fear their prisoners, slave-owners their
slaves, the occupiers the occupied. That much was deeply ingrained in the white
American psyche long before the Black Panthers posed for posters. What white
Americans needed to be taught was to respect black Americans. And that
fundamental change in attitude, so long coming, was the direct result of the
sit-downs, the marches, the boycotts—the bravery of the resistance to oppression
that King's life and history and, indeed, his martyrdom epitomizes. It was
the bravery of the righteous, not only in the religious and moral sense, but in
the pure common-sense sense that King and his followers were doing much more
than acting out their anger or fighting for revenge. They were correcting an
aberration in society so wildly irrational that, to look back on it today,
one must wonder how and why it ever existed.
Forty years from now—and possibly in less time than that—we could look back
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and on what now seems the endless Age
of Despotism in the Arab world, as something almost inconceivable. But for
that to happen the people who hunger for that moment, and I believe that almost
everyone in the Middle East does hunger for that moment, will have to reject
the idea that only violence can appease their fury, or that some day some
outside force will simply recognize their rectitude and fix the problems they
can never seem to resolve on their own.
Over the weekend I was in Doha, Qatar, where two conferences took place. One
was a confab—call it a quasi-summit—of a few Arab and Muslim leaders
(including the head of Hamas and the president of Iran), which preceded another
summit of other Arab and European leaders in Egypt, which came before another
summit of most Arab leaders in Kuwait which tried to repair the damage done by
the earlier summits. And what all of these leaders contributed to the cause
of peace and reconciliation in the Middle East was, as far as I can tell (and
I have watched a lot of these things) precisely nothing new at all.
The other Doha conference was more interesting. Attending were a couple of
hundred people assembled from all over the world under the rubric Muslim
Leaders of Tomorrow. Unlike the Muslim leaders of today, this group was less
interested in posturing and intramural rivalries than in finding some practical
solutions to the many problems that address their people, whether in Gaza or
Rotterdam, Kabul or Los Angeles. There was a lot of talk about community
organizing. One well-attended seminar on the subject, conducted by a Palestinian
lawyer, held up Obama's presidential campaign and even his 2004 speech at the
Democratic National convention as paradigms to study.
Obama, you will recall, started as a community organizer. So did Dr. King.
Of course it's obvious that more will be required than a few marches, sit-ins
and boycotts to change the habits of occupation and internal repression in
the Palestinian territories. It took a lot more than that to bring the United
States as far as it has come. But civil disobedience in the Middle East has
some promising precedents, even in the blood-drenched Holy Land.
The Arabs of the little village of Bil'in on the West Bank, working with
Israeli and Palestinian activists, have won international attention and the
support of the Israeli courts in their fight to change the path of the wall that
would have divided their community. But there is an earlier and even more
significant example.
The closest the Palestinians have ever come to what Dr. King and President
Obama might understand as massive civil disobedience was the first Intifada
that began in 1987 and lasted until 1993. It finished forever the Palestinians'
passive endurance of Israeli occupation. Before then, for the first two
decades after the West Bank and Gaza were taken by the Israelis in the 1967 war,
the Palestinians there had waited for the Arab Nation or their own leaders in
exile or maybe the good offices of the United States to end their plight.
Then they just couldn't wait any more. Children began throwing stones at the
Israelis, and would not stop, even when soldiers broke their bones. That is
not nonviolent, to be sure, but the message was much the same: a popular
uprising based on sheer guts against the massive brawn of the occupiers. And the
rock-throwers were backed by general strikes and refusals to buy Israeli
products.
That sort of resistance, built on asymmetric courage, not asymmetric
warfare, can change radically the way adversaries think about each other and
themselves. It can open the door to peace, and there was a long moment in the early
and mid-1990s when the Middle East conflict was indeed much closer to being
resolved than most people remember now. Made possible by massive, mostly
nonviolent resistance, it was destroyed by terrorist acts on both sides. An
Israeli slaughtered dozens of unarmed Arabs as they prayed in Hebron in 1994.
Another Israeli murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as he attended a rally,
singing peace songs in Tel Aviv in 1995. Among the Palestinians, Hamas and other
groups, including a wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization, embraced
the notion that only ferocious, suicidal violence could win respect.
Very likely Hamas still believes that, even after the events of the last
month demonstrated how powerless it is to defend its people, and how feckless
its little fireworks displays really are. All Hamas's violent resistance does
is make it easier for otherwise sensible Israelis to rationalize the use of
overwhelming force, and while many regret the death of so many hundreds of
innocents, the general sentiment in Israel is that proportionality is for
suckers. You meet fire with fire, and if you've got the guns, you use them. Having
made its point, the Israeli government has been shrewd enough to pull most of
its forces out of Gaza just before Obama takes the oath of office. It might
even claim it did him a favor.
So, as the new American president takes power, we will hear many voices in
the Arab and Muslim world calling on Obama to impose peace on the Middle East.
And, yes, he can help and, I believe, wants to do so. But he has to have
something to work with. An Arab movement that shows its unity and courage
through stubborn peaceful resistance, not violent potshots and suicidal rituals,
would offer a truly new beginning. Civil disobedience is a language of
confrontation that leaves the door open to conciliation. It was the language of Dr.
King, and it is a language that Barack Hussein Obama, the
community-organizer-cum-president, understands very well. Some Arabs know it already. Others
would be wise to listen to them.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/180635
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