According to a recent survey conducted by the Dubai-based public relations firm ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, young Arabs want democracy, jobs and affordable homes. The findings imply that the vast majority – 85 to 99 percent of the 2,000 18-to-24 year-olds polled in nine countries including the GCC, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon – share the same aspirations as their counterparts in the globalized community, clearly rejecting a hidebound Arab world that has failed to get with the program.
Still, old habits die hard. This weekend, while young Arabs were no doubt downloading music from iTunes and wondering how the job interview with the multinational went, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again bored us by announcing that the 9/11 attacks were a “big lie”, while in Lebanon, on the eve of the national dialogue, his proxy army, Hezbollah, gave the middle finger to Lebanon’s shaky democratic principles by announcing that its weapons, which have apparently tripled in number since the 2006 war with Israel, were non-negotiable.
Ahmadinejad is no stranger to sharing with the world his take on history. He infamously declared that the extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War was a myth. His latest theory, that the US engineered the flying of three commercial aircraft into national landmarks just to have an excuse invade Afghanistan and control the world’s oil reserves, is part of this world view.
It would be funny if so many people didn’t believe him. Tragically, the Arab world is built on suspicion and conspiracy, a paranoia fuelled by one very powerful drug: Israel. Ahmadinejad is a potent peddler of the line that Israeli and US ambitions are inextricably tied, and that a secret Jewish cabal controls Washington and concocts the most outrageous evil to achieve common goals.
This theory says that Israel is the reason the Arabs are where we are today. It is Israel’s fault that the Palestinians have failed to achieve nationhood. The Jews concocted the Holocaust to convince the international community to give them a country. Israel planned the 9/11 attacks (remember the thousands of Jews who didn’t go to work that day) to further entrench US interests in the Middle East. Israel killed Rafik Hariri to make it look like Syria did it. Israel wants to absorb Lebanon (it says so in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so it must be true). Israel was behind every assassinated Lebanese politician or public figure. We could go on.
The Arabs have learned to blame Israelis or Jews for the many problems facing the world. It is easy and shifts responsibility from our own shoulders onto a more powerful enemy, a giant bogeyman. And so we sit in pathetic acceptance of what we see as our lot in life as part of nations still characterized by corruption, violence and repression, where human rights, equality, democracy, transparency and accountability have no place. We prefer to live in the opium den of anti-Semitism than be proactive.
In Lebanon, the plot takes a more cynical twist. Here, Hezbollah has succeeded in styling itself as the one entity in the last seven decades to successfully stand up to the Zionist enemy, one that it claims poses a permanent threat to Lebanon’s independence and sovereignty. And yet, in its pursuit of standing up to this perceived threat (we say perceived because we do not know what Israel’s military posture would be if Hezbollah did not exist) at the behest of Syria and Iran, Hezbollah tramples on the very sovereignty it claims to protect, while using fear to keep an obedient constituency in check.
No wonder our best and brightest seek jobs abroad. They have spoken. They ache for a bite at life’s cherry. They want respect; they want prosperity and they want security. They won’t find it in a region that still flounders in the swamp of conspiracy and conflict.
