This afternoon I'll send you Jackie Goldberg's ballot rec's. As usual,
many have requested them. Marty Hittleman, president of the California
Federation of Teachers and an Echo Park native has just sent his own
recommendations. They are almost identical to Jackies, but will send
them in the near future. If you want them now, please write me.
Ed
Robert Fisk: These are secular popular revolts - yet everyone is blaming
religion
Our writer, who was in Cairo as the revolution took hold in Egypt, reports
from Bahrain on why Islam has little to do with what is going on
Independent Sunday, 20 February 2011
Mubarak claimed that Islamists were behind the Egyptian revolution. Ben Ali
said the same in Tunisia. King Abdullah of Jordan sees a dark and sinister
hand - al-Qa'ida's hand, the Muslim Brotherhood's hand, an Islamist hand -
behind the civil insurrection across the Arab world. Yesterday the Bahraini
authorities discovered Hizbollah's bloody hand behind the Shia uprising
there. For Hizbollah, read Iran. How on earth do well-educated if singularly
undemocratic men get this thing so wrong? Confronted by a series of secular
explosions - Bahrain does not quite fit into this bracket - they blame
radical Islam. The Shah made an identical mistake in reverse. Confronted by
an obviously Islamic uprising, he blamed it on Communists.
Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having
originally supported the "stable" dictatorships of the Middle East - when
they should have stood by the forces of democracy - they decided to support
civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were
so utterly disenchanted with the West's hypocrisy that they didn't want
America on their side. "The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years
under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers," an Egyptian
student told me in Tahrir Square last week. "Now we would be grateful if
they stopped interfering on our side." At the end of the week, I heard
identical voices in Bahrain. "We are getting shot by American weapons fired
by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks," a medical
orderly told me on Friday. "And now Obama wants to be on our side?"
The events of the past two months and the spirit of anti-regime Arab
insurrection - for dignity and justice, rather than any Islamic emirate -
will remain in our history books for hundreds of years. And the failure of
Islam's strictest adherents will be discussed for decades. There was a
special piquancy to the latest footage from al-Qa'ida yesterday, recorded
before the overthrow of Mubarak, that emphasised the need for Islam to
triumph in Egypt; yet a week earlier the forces of secular, nationalist,
honourable Egypt, Muslim and Christian men and women, had got rid of the old
man without any help from Bin Laden Inc. Even weirder was the reaction from
Iran, whose supreme leader convinced himself that the Egyptian people's
success was a victory for Islam. It's a sobering thought that only al-Qa'ida
and Iran and their most loathed enemies, the anti-Islamist Arab dictators,
believed that religion lay behind the mass rebellion of pro-democracy
protesters.
The bloodiest irony of all - which dawned rather slowly on Obama - was that
the Islamic Republic of Iran was praising the democrats of Egypt while
threatening to execute its own democratic opposition leaders.
Not, then, a great week for "Islamicism". There's a catch, of course. Almost
all the millions of Arab demonstrators who wish to shrug off the cloak of
autocracy which - with our Western help - has smothered their lives in
humiliation and fear are indeed Muslims. And Muslims - unlike the
"Christian" West - have not lost their faith. Under the stones and coshes of
Mubarak's police killers, they counter-attacked, shouting "Allah akbar" for
this was indeed for them a "jihad" - not a religious war but a struggle for
justice. "God is Great" and a demand for justice are entirely consistent.
For the struggle against injustice is the very spirit of the Koran.
In Bahrain we have a special case. Here a Shia majority is ruled by a
minority of pro-monarchy Sunni Muslims. Syria, by the way, may suffer from
"Bahrainitis" for the same reason: a Sunni majority ruled by an Alawite
(Shia) minority. Well, at least the West - in its sagging support for King
Hamad of Bahrain - can point to the fact that Bahrain, like Kuwait, has a
parliament. It's a sad old beast, existing from 1973 to 1975 when it was
dissolved unconstitutionally, and then reinvented in 2001 as part of a
package of "reforms". But the new parliament turned out to be even more
unrepresentative than the first. Opposition politicians were harassed by
state security, and parliamentary boundaries were gerrymandered,
Ulster-style, to make sure that the minority Sunnis controlled it. In 2006
and 2010, for example, the main Shia party in Bahrain gained only 18 out of
40 seats. Indeed, there is a distinctly Northern Ireland feel to Sunni
perspectives in Bahrain. Many have told me that they fear for their lives,
that Shia mobs will burn their homes and kill them.
All this is set to change. Control of state power has to be legitimised to
be effective, and the use of live fire to overwhelm peaceful protest was
bound to end in Bahrain in a series of little Bloody Sundays. Once Arabs
learnt to lose their fear, they could claim the civil rights that Catholics
in Northern Ireland once demanded in the face of RUC brutality. In the end,
the British had to destroy Unionist rule and bring the IRA into joint power
with Protestants. The parallels are not exact and the Shias do not (yet)
have a militia, although the Bahraini government has produced photographs of
pistols and swords - hardly a major weapon of the IRA - to support their
contention that its opponents include "terrorists".
In Bahrain there is, needless to say, a sectarian as much as a secular
battle, something that the Crown Prince unwittingly acknowledged when he
originally said that the security forces had to suppress protests to prevent
sectarian violence. It's a view held all too savagely by Saudi Arabia, which
has a strong interest in the suppression of dissent in Bahrain. The Shias of
Saudi Arabia might get uppity if their co-religionists in Bahrain overwhelm
the state. Then we'll really hear the leaders of the Shia Islamic Republic
of Iran crowing.
But these interconnected insurrections should not be seen in a simple
ferment-in-the-Middle-East framework. The Yemeni uprising against President
Saleh (32 years in power) is democratic but also tribal, and it won't be
long before the opposition uses guns. Yemen is a heavily armed society,
tribes with flags, nationalist-rampant. And then there is Libya.
Gaddafi is so odd, his Green Book theories - dispatched by Benghazi
demonstrators last week when they pulled down a concrete version of this
particular volume - so preposterous, his rule so cruel (and he's been
running the place for 42 years) that he is an Ozymandias waiting to fall.
His flirtation with Berlusconi - worse still, his cloying love affair with
Tony Blair whose foreign secretary, Jack Straw, praised the Libyan lunatic's
"statesmanship" - was never going to save him. Bedecked with more medals
than General Eisenhower, desperate for a doctor to face-lift his sagging
jowls, this wretched man is threatening "terrible" punishment against his
own people for challenging his rule. Two things to remember about Libya:
like Yemen, it's a tribal land; and when it turned against its Italian
fascist overlords, it began a savage war of liberation whose brave leaders
faced the hangman's noose with unbelievable courage. Just because Gaddafi is
a nutter does not mean his people are fools.
So it's a sea-change in the Middle East's political, social, cultural world.
It will create many tragedies, raise many hopes and shed far too much blood.
Better perhaps to ignore all the analysts and the "think tanks" whose silly
"experts" dominate the satellite channels. If Czechs could have their
freedom, why not the Egyptians? If dictators can be overthrown in Europe -
first the fascists, then the Communists - why not in the great Arab Muslim
world? And - just for a moment - keep religion out of this.
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