Our World
They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain. There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain. The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch AND I DON’T LIKE ANYBODY VERY MUCH!!*
In the new millennium version substitute Americans for Germans and for Poles – or leave it alone, the French and Germans are capable of hating more than one country at a time. It is still easy to be cynical.
They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain. There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain. The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch AND I DON’T LIKE ANYBODY VERY MUCH!!*
In the new millennium version substitute Americans for Germans and for Poles – or leave it alone, the French and Germans are capable of hating more than one country at a time. It is still easy to be cynical.
It turns out that the UN system was thoroughly complicit in the rape of Iraq through corruption in the “oil for food” program. France and Germany used their influence to protect their economic (oil) interests and foil the American/British attempt to create a UN-led international coalition to oust Saddam. They’re doing the same on Iranian nukes. Israel is in the dock at The Hague for building a fence. Spanish voters used the al-Qaeda’ voters’ guide to install a government that calls terrorism in Spain our fault.
On the other hand Libya got the message and the world is surely a safer place since the U.S. took possession of its nuclear and chemical material. Kaddafi admitted Libya sought nuclear weapons “without really thinking against whom we would use it. But today… it becomes a problem to have a nuclear bomb… Who’s the enemy?”
There is anti-government rioting in Syria for the first time since the Hama massacres in 1984, and anti-Syrian rioting in Lebanon. The Arab League divided over economic reforms and President Bush’s Middle East Democracy Initiative, rather than offering the usual robotic rejection of anything that could disturb its dictatorial powers.
In another context, Jordan’s Planning Minister announced, “Many countries in the Arab world have used the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian issue as an excuse not to advance reforms in their own countries… you cannot wait until the Arab-Israeli conflict is solved before you start implementing the necessary reforms.”
And finally, in Ha’aretz, Khaled Jalabi is quoted from Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan: “At first glance, it appears that Israel endured the humiliation of conducting negotiations with a faction and not a state, with the aim of freeing one individual in exchange for hundreds of prisoners… On a pure arithmetic reckoning, the meaning is that Israel viewed the three corpses and the one living man as being equivalent to any number of people… the moral is that, in Israel’s view, the life of an Israeli, even one of Arab origin, is considered invaluable. In contrast, an Arab citizen can be thrown in prison for having surfed on the opposition’s Web site… that shows how much a citizen’s life is worth in the eyes of Arab regimes.”
It is a strange day when the good news emanates from stirrings in the Arab world and the antidote for cynicism comes from the Saudi press.
*From “The Merry Minuet” by Sheldon Harnick (1959)