Confidence Built On Ignorance of Arab History

By Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal, Arab News, Al-Jazeerah, 2 August 2003

Recently I was watching a discussion on Fox TV concerning the various ways the US may choose to deal with Iran. The debate was whether a military option was a suitable method.

One of the experts, who was not in favor of a military approach, interjected saying Hold on. The Iranians cannot be pushed around, they are not Arabs!

I found that to be a most instructive statement.

So apparently some Americans believe that Arabs are particularly susceptible to being pushed around by the US.

Very interesting.

The dreaded Mongols, who overran Iraq and sacked Baghdad in the14 th century killing an estimated 800 thousand people in a week: Do you know how long they lasted in Iraq?

Eighteen months.

Then they were kicked out of Iraq, never to return.

The Ottoman Turks ruled the Arabs for five centuries, and we accepted them willingly because they were ruling in the name of Islam as the Caliphs of the Muslim Ummah. We fought in their wars and paid taxes to their government and prayed in our mosques for the continued glory of the sultan and his empire.

Then the Turks decided that Islam was old hat and the young Turks transformed their state into a Turkish nationalist empire.

Two years later the Arabs revolted and kicked them out.

Here is another example US citizens' by-now legendary ignorance of history on display.

They fail to remember that the Arab nations were conquered, in the 19th century, by European nations who were at the time more powerful vis-à-vis the Arab world than the US is today. Yet it took the Arabs between 30 to 80 years to send all of them packing.

Please spare us the nonsense that they left on their own accord because they realized the injustice they were perpetrating against us. They left because they were bleeding to death in our land, and they realized that we would never give up until we had totally rid ourselves of their occupation.

The state of Israel is a Western (not only US) creation supported from its inception by all the Western countries as well as the USSR and its east European allies.

Nevertheless, the Arabs never accepted this colonial implantation in their midst. They fought four wars in which Israel, thanks to Western support, had a larger army than all Arab armies combined and with arms far superior to anything the Arabs had, in addition to having all the intelligence of the Western powers placed at its disposal.

The West has supplied the Zionist state with weapons of mass destruction from chemical to biological to the ultimate WMD, the nuclear. All this was not enough; the West poured and still pours massive economic aid into the Zionist state.

And yet, it is all to no avail.

The Arabs will deal with Israel ultimately as they dealt with Great Britain, France, Italy and all the rest.

As for the newest Western colonials on the block, it is a pity that they are so incredibly ignorant of history, for they are doomed to repeat it. The first time it was a tragedy; the second time it will be a farce.