By: Jane Stillwater
I recently spent four hours hanging out at the newly-renovated Cairo international airport, and then eight hours more sleeping on a lounge chair at the airport in Doha — so does this brief-but-intense experience now make me an expert on the entire Middle East? Sure.
If you don’t count the Crusades, the Middle East’s most deadly encounter with the West’s political and economic chessboard began way back in 1918 — after the Turkish Empire crumbled, after the heroic times of Lawrence of Arabia and after the Great War. That’s when a deadly and brutal Arab Holocaust originally began.
After World War I ended, Palestine was cut into pieces by the European powers, Egypt was denied the independence that it had been promised by the Brits, the despotic Saudis tightened their grip on the Arabian Peninsula, various heavy-handed but Western-friendly emirates and potentates sprang up, colonialism grew apace, France put the thumbscrews on Algeria, etc.
And one gigantic shadow also loomed menacingly over all this frantic neo-colonial scramble for the Middle East: The automobile. Oil.
Then came World War II and, after Rommel the Desert Fox was ousted by the Allies, times got even tougher in the Middle East in the late 1940s and 1950s — as Palestine was violently seized by European neo-colonials, the CIA invaded Iran and Iraq’s nascent democracies, puppet dictators were established by American and Israeli neo-colonial interests, and local non-puppet dictators and democracies alike were bloodily deposed.
By the 1960s, all the seeds for an Arab Holocaust that had been eagerly planted and watered earlier by greedy Western political and corporate chess masters began to really start to grow — and suddenly the Arab Holocaust was truly well under way.
In the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the Arab Holocaust tree began to blossom profusely and bear strange fruit as American corporate chess players continued demanding a larger and larger piece of the pie — with the seizure of Sinai and the West Bank, the betrayal of the USS Liberty, the occupation of Gaza, Reagan’s bloody eight-year surrogate war that took over a million lives in Iran and Iraq, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed an additional 250,000 men, women and children.
And all this vigorous military activity in the Middle East looked just fine on the chessboards of European, Israeli and American war rooms — but what did its reality on the ground look like? A human holocaust. The Arab Holocaust.
Whenever corporate-owned America moved a pawn on its Middle East chessboard in Washington and set up the Shah in Iran and Saddam Hussein in Iraq and helped unleash Moshe Dayan onto Palestine, to them it looked merely like pawns being knocked over — or pieces of paper changing hands.
But those pieces of paper were also death warrants for hundreds of thousands of Arabs all across the entire Middle East.
Then along came Charlie Wilson’s War — when the U.S. happily armed bin Laden and Al Qaeda. And we all know how that went: The Taliban came to power and untold thousands of Afghans ended up dead (not to mention an additional 5,000 Americans).
Then when Bush Senior and Bush Junior decided to invade Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq and also pay for the cruel napalming of Gaza, at least a million more people died. And when Obama continued to fund the occupation of Afghanistan and Palestinehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_dk-1nYSJU&feature=youtu.be and NATO invaded Libya and Syria, and Arabia’s and Yemen’s and Bahrain’s bids for democracy were brutally suppressed, more Arabs died. Many many more.
And now we have entered the age of the drone — and the Arab Holocaust continues.
And according to Middle East expert Pepe Escobar, Israel and the CIA have just happily hopped into bed with Al Qaeda once again — in order to kill as many Syrians as they possibly can.http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NH03Ak04.html
For almost a century now, the Middle East has lived under a man-made Holocaust hurricane that has brutally killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent Arab women and children as well as men — and killed them with enthusiasm and ease.
And when will this vicious and uncivilized Arab Holocaust finally ever end? After every single Arab in the Middle East has been killed? Or when they have finally run out of oil over there.
PS: I am using the term “Arab” loosely here. Within the eclectic mix of over a million dead bodies that have been piled up in the Middle East in the last many decades by callous acts of Western neo-colonialism, you will find not only “Arab” corpses per se — but also corpses that spoke Farsi, Urdu and Pashtu, Muslim corpses, Sunni corpses, Shia corpses, Christian corpses, Jewish corpses, Druze corpses and even Zoroastrian corpses — all equitably rotting away in the bright Middle East sun.
As far as I can tell, the only two actual components that human beings seem to require in order to be included in the West’s neo-colonial list of possible “Arab Holocaust” victims are to have the same skin tones as Jesus and to live in the Middle East.
PPS: I just saw a program on TV that discussed how former Nazis who participated in the WWII Jewish Holocaust are still being hunted down and punished even now. So WHEN will the war criminals of the Arab Holocaust start to be brought to justice as well? Or are we just hypocrites.
PPPS: Having survived my odyssey through the Rome, Cairo, Entebbe and Doha airports in one piece, I am now ready, willing and able to tackle the Singapore airport next. Wish me luck.
*********************************************************
*********************************************************
Advertisements for myself: In these hard times of brutal (and illegal) corporatist ball-busting socialism-for-the-rich-only, I am doing whatever I can to make a spare dollar. Here are some of my current alternate-economy schemes that never seem to work — but I keep hoping!
******
What next? Now I’m trying to go to a six-day voodoo ceremony in a cave somewhere in Haiti. Please donate toward my trip expenses here:https://www.wepay.com/xh8kekc
Also my son Joe is trying to raise money to film a documentary on this event. Check out his video of the voodoo master here — a truly heavy-duty dude:
https://www.wepay.com/donations/suzandoc
“This documentary is about capturing a Haitian Voodoo Ceremony experienced through the perspective of Suzan (a Shaman leader). The ceremony takes place in a cave that Suzan had lived in for 10 years in Fonds-des-Nègres, Haiti, 114 km west of Port Au Prince.”
[Quote=Article]I just saw a program on TV that discussed how former Nazis who participated in the WWII Jewish Holocaust are still being hunted down and punished even now. So WHEN will the war criminals of the Arab Holocaust start to be brought to justice as well? Or are we just hypocrites.[/quote]
Well, that Nazi hunt is pretty much over – most anyone that was involved in that ethnic cleansing campaign is either dead alreay or else rotting away in an old folks’ home (probably not even aware of what day it is or what planet they live on…). Any hunt that might still be going on for them is pure politics: plain and simple.
The reality of the world is that victor is never punished for any offenses he may have committed against the vanquished – yet the vanquished parties are hunted to the very ends of the earth just to let everyone know that they are indeed among the losers of history’s conflicts: such things as “justice,” “human rights” and all that shit is just a smokescreen to see the purpose of hunting the vanquished down…
“The reality of the world is that victor is never punished for any offenses he may have committed against the vanquished – yet the vanquished parties are hunted to the very ends of the earth just to let everyone know that they are indeed among the losers of history’s conflicts.” That’s probably why the wars continue. To stop would mean to examine the culprits responsible for the loss of so many innocent lives. Who will stand up and say the administrators who agreed to these wars, who financed and sent troops into them are guilty of murder? Who will administer justice toward the guilty parties, considering the extent of agreement by all branches of the government, making them all co-conspirators, all culpable. The US can’t stop because then it would have to answer for its crimes. It must continue being the criminal, the thug, until it has been defeated. Germany didn’t voluntarily search for war criminals on its own, and neither will the US.
I don’t think you understand Karlsie – there are no “war criminals” because war is, by definition, an absence of “law” in which two or more parties are contesting for the privillage to institute their own brand of order by force of arms: whatever the victor of the conflict does is by definition “legal” because the victor makes the “law” to suit his own purposes. The whole concept of the “war criminal” is propaganda used to demonize the vanquished parties of any given conflict and nothing more.
And to answer your question of who will “administer justice” – no one. “Justice” itself is just an illusion: a construct to give one party seeking vengence legitimacy over another – in short, it’s socially-acceptable revenge and nothing more. And I’ll all for taking vengence into one’s own hands and don’t deny anyone the opportunity to do so; I only ask that people don’t delude themselves into thinking that what they do is actually “justice” in any way, shape or form…
Az, just because a bunch of corrupt politicians won’t uphold justice, doesn’t make the concept an illusion.
I _can_ act justly towards others and the world. So can you. This is all that matters IMO.
I still dream of a united middle east, like it was a couple of centuries ago before the Ottoman empire crumbled and Persia was divided into a hundred pieces by the British and the Russians.
But right now with Arabs betraying other Arabs while blaming all their problems on Iran.. seems like they’re all playing right into the empire’s hands.
The united states of the middle east ftw. With all the oil and gas sitting under their feet they’d be the most powerful nation in the world.
I swear they’d bankrupt and dissolve the empire practically overnight.
I dream of an empire divided against itself, state against state, at war..
With so many weapons in the hands of the American Joe, they’d just massacre eachother and the rest of the world won’t have to pay for their luxurious lives anymore.
A lot of people in Iran today are living off of $200 USD per mo, while Americans piss away thousands of dollars each month on crap that they don’t even need.
The American public are a huge part of the problem. Over 300 million people living wildly extravagant lives while the rest of the world pays for it.
Here’s a note for Americans who have a conscience: Think about moving back to your home countries, where your ancestors came from. There’s plenty of room I promise; and if you originally came from a third world country, please go back, use what you’ve learned and lend a hand in developing it. This is IMHO the only honorable course of action for non-native americans.
Because really, how is the USA any different than Zionist Israel? I don’t know who’s worse off, the Palestinians? or the Native Americans??
While sanctions the US (ha! UN] imposed on Iraq, Libya and now Iran hurt the population, they hurt far less than drone strikes. (After all, they worked so well on bringing Cuba to heel.)
At least in the case of the three ME countries mentioned, all had functioning govts. So maybe there wasn’t much true freedom of expression, people were eating, making love, getting educated, making music.
In the case of the former two, the societies have descended into corrupt anarchy and chaos. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see it was better before.