‘Death to the infidels!’ Why it’s time to fix Hollywood’s problem with Muslims

We all know that today's war is more of a media war than the good, old war with weapons. As the article correctly points out that what's happening in Middle East, what's happening in Muslim-majority countries around the world due to the world's sense of security & misrepresentations of Muslims countries as full of lecherous, evil, gun-toting Muslims, & the treatment of Muslims in Western countries is down to one fact only, which is that Hollywood movies have a big contribution in destroying the reputation of Muslims as responsible citizens of their countries, wherever they reside.

This narrative of all Muslims being evil is so ingrained in public's mind, with the help of media & Hollywood, that when Hollywood tries to tell a good story, like "Lions for Lambs," or "Redacted," the general public shun those movies, & those movies do horribly at the box office & later on, as rentals. The Western public wants to see Muslims being labelled as evildoers. That's why, movies like "American Sniper," & TV shows like 24, Homeland, & Quantico do great in the West.

Then, these same Western countries decry violence against Muslims in their own countries, & complain that Muslims in Muslim-majority countries seemingly hate them. That's their hypocrisy. Why make such movies, shows, & news media, which depicts Muslims as nothing less than barbaric individuals & then complain that Muslims don't like the Western public. Actually, Muslims are very forgiving people that they watch those movies, know that they are being discriminated & misrepresented, but still, they are not out to kill & hurt people in the West.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/08/death-to-infidels-time-to-fix-hollywoods-problem-muslims

Great convo w studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative,” tweeted John Kerry on 16 February, along with a photo of himself in a Hollywood meeting lounge with executives from Universal, Warner, Fox, Disney, Sony, Dreamworks and other big players – overwhelmingly middle-aged white men in suits.

One can’t help imagining there were some awkward moments to this “great convo”, though. Especially if Kerry queried what Hollywood had done to counter the “#Daesh narrative” so far. Even more so, if he asked what juicy counter-terrorism stories they had coming down the pipeline. Looking at the current output, such as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Rock the Kasbah and London Has Fallen, you could easily get the impression that Hollywood is part of the problem, rather than a potential solution.

If you accept the notion of a “war of narratives”, it’s an area where the extremists have done most of the running. Still ringing in Washington’s ears and heading its PowerPoint presentations is the declaration the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri made in 2005: “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.” Isis/Daesh has been sending a steady stream of video content on to that media battlefield, the relative sophistication of which has filled western commentators with a mix of horror, concern and admiration. The US and its coalition partners have floundered over how to respond.

Kerry’s visit to Hollywood comes a month after the State Department revamped its Countering Violent Extremism programme. Since 2010, that role had been performed by the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC); its counter-messaging often leaned towards counter-productive messaging. One of its strategies, for example, was to engage directly with Isis jihadists on Twitter, but that only served to legitimise their voices. The CSCC also put out a parody recruitment video, repurposing Isis’s violent propaganda footage and broadcasting it under the seal of the State Department. “Run, do not walk to Isis land,” ran the text of the ad. “Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket!” As the TV satirist John Oliver remarked: “You are banking a lot on any potential militants understanding that that is sarcasm.”

“If our message is that Daesh is a criminal organisation that represents a distorted view of Islam, the US government is not the best conveyor of that message,” says Richard Stengel, undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the State Department. “The best conveyors are local people and Muslims and clerics and NGOs. So, rather than be in the business of doing tit-for-tat tweets with Daesh, we realised that we have an expertise in funding and messaging. What can we do to empower, amplify, optimise the messaging that’s out there already? That’s the central paradigm shift.”

This is by no means the first time in the 21st century that the White House has turned to Tinseltown. Just a month after 9/11, George W Bush’s top adviser, Karl Rove, convened a similar council of movie execs for a counter-terrorist pitching session, although it apparently came to nothing. There was no discussion of putting government propaganda into movies, it was reported. “Content was off the table,” said Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Pictures Association of America.

Content was also off the table at Kerry’s Hollywood trip, it appears. “It wasn’t about asking them to make an Islamic Harry Potter,” says Stengel. “It’s not like the cold war, trying to insert positive narratives into movies. It’s connected in the largest possible way to defeating Daesh. It was an opportunity to talk to these people who shape content around the world, who shape the American brand around the world. An opportunity to go to them and say: ‘What can you do to help?’ in what [Kerry] has called the generational struggle of our time.”

But if Hollywood has any meaningful role to play here, content is arguably exactly what should be on the table. Throughout its history, American cinema has employed a lamentably narrow set of stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. “They’ve been the most vilified group in the history of Hollywood,” says the academic and author Jack Shaheen. His book Reel Bad Arabs surveys some 1,200 depictions of Arabs and Muslims in the movies. By his estimation, roughly 97% are unfavourable, coloured by orientalist myths, racist demonising and xenophobic paranoia. “At most, three dozen or so had balance, or what I would call positive images. In the rest of them, Arabs are either terrorists or shady sheikhs or people you would not want to associate with. Those images continue to pervade our psyches.”

There are too many egregious examples to list. Selected highlights would include True Lies (Arnold Schwarzenegger versus fanatical yet incompetent Palestinian terrorists, who detonate a nuclear device in Florida), Protocol (Goldie Hawn becomes concubine to a lecherous oil-rich sheikh, so that the US can build a military base in his country), Network (“The Arabs are simply buying us,” rails Peter Finch’s rebel presenter), and 1998 thriller The Siege (in which Arab-Americans are rounded up after a New York terrorist attack. The critic Roger Ebert wrote: “The prejudicial attitudes embodied in the film are insidious, like the antisemitism that infected fiction and journalism in the 1930s”). And special mention must go to William Friedkin’s 2000 thriller Rules of Engagement, in which Samuel L Jackson’s marine goes on trial for massacring a crowd of Yemenis, but is exonerated when it turns out they were all gun-toting evildoers, even the women and children.

Rules of Engagement was “probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood”, protested the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee at the time. But then 9/11 happened and things became even worse. Old-fashioned Islamophobia is still thriving, as demonstrated by current release London Has Fallen, in which Gerard Butler saves the world from yet another brown-skinned, detonator-happy terrorist with an Arab-sounding name, and dispatches evildoers with lines such as: “Get back to Fuckheadistan, or wherever you’re from.” Meanwhile, counter-terrorism-themed TV series such as 24, Homeland, Sleeper Cell and NCIS reiterate the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” notion, with the added point that they’re on American soil now. “Hollywood and television have created an even more dangerous precedent by vilifying American Arabs and American Muslims in particular,” says Shaheen. “They’ve blended the old stereotypes from ‘over there’ with new stereotypes from ‘over here’.”

When Hollywood has made attempts to address the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts directly, the casualty list has been high: Lions for Lambs, The Messenger, Stop Loss, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, Redacted – all of them flopped at the box office. Even The Hurt Locker, with its Oscars and all-round acclaim, was greeted with widespread indifference by the American public, taking just $17m (£12m).

Only a handful of Afghanistan/Iraq films have struck a chord with US audiences: Zero Dark Thirty, detailing the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, made $95m domestically; Afghanistan action thriller Lone Survivor made $125m; and overshadowing them all is Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, based on the real-life Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who holds the record for the most kills in US military history. It took more than $350m, making it the highest grossing movie of 2014 in the US.

When viewed through the prism of “countering the #Daesh narrative”, these movies make uncomfortable viewing. Zero Dark Thirty took a relatively nuanced approach to the war on terror, but controversially depicted Arabs being tortured. Both American Sniper and Lone Survivor narrowly focus on US military personnel and their efforts to kill nameless, faceless “bad guys”. Wider questions about American foreign policy, or how ordinary Afghanis and Iraqis felt about being invaded, are sidestepped in favour of heat-of-the-battle immediacy. In its opening minutes, American Sniper gets in the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” trope, as Kyle guns down a woman and a child who both try to attack US troops (the attack did not happen in real life). It gets worse from there on in. Not that the reality was much better. In his autobiography, Kyle wrote: “I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.”

These are the narratives the US has been sending out on to this ideological battlefield. Shaheen is not alone in wondering what role they have played, not just in the rise of Isis, but in the decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, not to mention the manner in which those wars were conducted, from the high levels of civilian casualties to atrocities such as those at Abu Ghraib. And how can these mythologies not play into the increasingly Islamophobic climate back home? Republican presidential nominees are presently engaged in an arms race of anti-Muslim rhetoric, against a background of vandalised mosques, threats, shootings and general discrimination. Isis’s own atrocities have contributed to this climate, of course, but homespun narratives seem to be fanning the flames. The release of American Sniper triggered a reported three-fold increase in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab threats.

“When you create this fear and it manifests itself in hate crimes, bias and bullying, then it alienates people,” says Humera Khan, the founder and executive director of Muflehun, a counter-violent-extremism thinktank. “Society is telling you: ‘You don’t belong.’ It is reinforcing what Isis is telling them.” Islamic extremists represent, at best, 100,000 people out of a worldwide Muslim population of 1.6 billion, Khan points out, but with the exception of the occasional token “good Muslim”, these are overwhelmingly the ones we see on our screens. She offers an analogy: “Imagine if you introduced someone to white people only by way of the Ku Klux Klan, but then said afterwards, ‘Oh, by way, there are some good white people out there, too.’”

In stereotyping Arabs and Muslims, the US also reinforces stereotypes about itself, Khan adds. Muslims around the world watch Hollywood movies, too – in greater numbers than Americans. “When these movies play in majority Muslim countries, the assumption is, ‘Look: they’re misrepresenting us again.’ So for the average person who’s not interested in Isis, the impression is: ‘America doesn’t like us.’ When you think about Isis’s message, that this is ‘a war against Muslims’, that’s exactly what they’re showing.”

Mirroring Washington’s recent shift in counter-messaging, Hollywood also seems to be taking a different tack: it is now coming at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars by way of comedy. Perhaps the studio bosses looked at their casualty list of box-office bombs and wondered if all that death, torture and moral complexity wasn’t putting people off. Having repeated the history as tragedy, Hollywood is repackaging it as farce.

Rock the Kasbah is an all-too-literal example of this. The movie ... draws on the true story of Setara Hussainzada, a Pashtun teenager who bravely tested post-invasion waters by entering Afghanistan’s new X Factor/Pop Idol equivalent, Afghan Star (women singing or dancing was strictly forbidden under Taliban rule). Hussainzada was already the subject of a 2009 documentary, also titled Afghan Star, but in Rock the Kasbah, she’s discovered in a cave by Bill Murray’s jaded rock promoter. He puts her into the spotlight with the aid of some fellow Americans: a twitchy soldier, two corrupt arms dealers and a sympathetic prostitute, who operates out of a trailer on the edge of town. From a “#Daesh narrative” perspective, they could represent the horsemen of the apocalypse, but the comic tone places the gruesome realities of war well in the background. As one review put it: “Rock the Kasbah gives the impression that the nation’s ideological rebirth would have been impossible without the gumption of a hasbeen music manager learning to shed his cynicism.”

It’s a similar story with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which opened in the US this weekend. Again, the plight of war-ravaged Afghanistan is largely window-dressing for the journey of our war-reporter heroine, Tina Fey, a fortysomething singleton who is pitched into the battlefield and the hard-partying expat “Kabubble”. One character lets the cat out of the bag by describing it as “the most American-white-lady story I’ve ever heard”. A few Afghani characters do get speaking parts in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. One is a clownish local politician, basically a standard-issue “lecherous Arab”, played by the British actor Alfred Molina. The other, Fey’s Afghani helper, Fahim, is that rarest of things: a male Muslim movie character who is intelligent, educated, empathetic and not the slightest bit lecherous. That bad news is he’s played by an American actor, Christopher Abbott, best known as Charlie out of Girls.

There’s more of this to come. Such as War Dogs, formerly titled Arms and the Dudes, about two real-life Miami stoners who made a fortune illegally exporting arms to Afghanistan with US approval – directed by the guy who made The Hangover. It sounds like a cross between The Wolf of Wall Street and Pineapple Express. Then there’s War Machine, in which Brad Pitt plays General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, who famously talked himself out of a job in a profile for Rolling Stone magazine, by expressing his contempt for Barack Obama and his administration. It could be a great satire – and there is certainly a place for those in cinema, when you think back to movies such as Catch-22, M*A*S*H, Dr Strangelove, or even Three Kings or Team America. There have been a plethora of fine American documentaries chronicling this era, too. But again, what does it mean for the battle of narratives?

For Hollywood, it can look like a case of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”. Either they take a purely US-centric point of view and dehumanise Arabs and Muslims – which plays right into the #Daesh narrative. Or they take a critical look at the US’s military and foreign policy failings – which also plays into the #Daesh narrative. What are they supposed to do?

A good start, says Shaheen, would be to stop perpetuating the same blinkered, divisive rhetoric as our enemies. It wouldn’t take much. “There really needs to be a couple of blockbuster films that squash these stereotypes, as well as some responsibility on the part of our political leaders, who are encouraging voters to hate their fellow Americans. It has to come from the top.” He cites the way Hollywood cleaned up its act with regard to racist depictions of African-Americans, Jews and LGBT characters.

Khan agrees: “If they were just more responsible in their portrayal of Arabs and Muslims, that would actually help the environment on the ground.” What happens on the ground, in Syria and Iraq especially, is obviously paramount if anything is to change, but movies absolutely have a role to play. “Is any narrative going to be sufficient? No. Is this a necessary part of this landscape of needs? Yes.”

Just as the US likes to think of itself as the world’s policeman, it is also unquestionably the world’s storyteller. That narrative supremacy comes with certain responsibilities, now more so than ever.

In the meantime, we can take comfort from the fact that even jihadis can’t resist a good movie. ...

Identity and Collective Denial - Lia Tarachansky on Reality Asserts Itself (2/3)

The only way to peacefully resolve a problem is by dialogue, & part of getting to the root of the problem is asking questions. Israel & Zionists have never self-reflect to the point that they can see that what they are doing is similar to what Hitler & Nazis did to them in Germany, Poland, Austria, & Netherlands.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPmj1NyTcBI

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Why do you go to Canada?

LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: Well, my father died, my mother became even more a Zionist, and I went to University, and all of my Zionist identity unraveled.
I can tell you a story. On my first year of university, I walked into my campus, and one day in the very beginning of the winter semester, the university was transformed into one giant flag of Israel. It was flags of Israel everywhere, and it said Israel Week. And in the student union building there was this huge row of tables, and they had all these banners, and they had these titles: Israel is the most democratic state in the Middle East, Israel is the most gay-friendly state in the Middle East, Israel has the best tomatoes in the Middle East, etc. And I walk in. And, I mean, I was shocked and weirded out and creeped out and all kinds of things, ’cause it–to me it made as much–like, Guelph, where I went to school, is a tiny little agricultural university. I mean, I was studying biomedicine in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of, like, fields in Canada. Like, it’s the same as having ... a Canada Week in some small college town in Zimbabwe. It made no sense to me. And so I walked past these people, and I just thought they looked weird, and ... they just creeped me out and they pissed me off because ... I was very much a Zionist and part of the project and Israel all the way, but I was a Russian in Israel. So I didn’t have any illusions about what Israeli democracy looks like. If you don’t fit into this box of what it means to be an Israeli, you’re out.
Which means Ashkenazi, which means strong, which means a veteran. It means a fighter. If you don’t fit into that, you’re out. If you don’t serve in the army, you’re out. If you adopt and embrace your Arab identity, you’re out.

...

I just thought that they were ridiculous, because they had no idea what Israel is all about. I mean, it’s a complex society. And it’s not like we walk around in Israel asking each other, hey, are you a Zionist? I mean, we don’t question each other’s opinions on the conflict, really, while we’re growing up.
I mean, the big debate in the ’90s was: are you for the Yitzhak Rabin plan or are you against it? But Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995. And with Netanyahu and the beginning of the Second Intifada, you kind of stopped debating these things.
No one ever asked me, what do you think? And so, when I came up to these excited 21-year-olds, I understood that the longest any one of them has been in Israel is one week on birthright. They didn’t know anything about us. They were driven on a bus funded by an American billionaire from one tourist site to the other. They met really nice soldiers. They met really friendly Israelis. They were told, this is your national homeland, welcome, you’re one of us. And they return back to Canada with the mission of representing Israel. They didn’t know a thing.
In Israel, we have a lot of jokes about birthright kids, but I won’t get into that here. ... The second year of university, I had decided I’m going to talk to them. Now, I didn’t know what the hell I’m going to say to them; I just knew, I’m going to talk to them. And as I came to campus–and again Israel flags, Israel Week–and this time they had a girl who was standing in the middle of the Canadian winter, outdoors, on campus, and for a week straight she read the names of every single person killed in the Holocaust. ... she stood there day and night and day for a week straight. So this was Israel Week for the Canadians, and this is what made me so upset is because to them they were presenting the Holocaust and this narrative of, like, Israel is the most blah blah blah.
And I think the reason it made me mad is because in Israel we don’t talk about the Holocaust. ... The Israel government uses it a lot to justify a lot of things, but we don’t. We’ve never really opened up the trauma of the Holocaust. We talk about what happened in Auschwitz. But a trauma is not the event of rape. It’s the ten years after the rape. It’s the way that the rape has intertwined itself into your very psychology. And that’s essentially what the Holocaust was for us. It was a national rape. It was not even a national, ’cause it’s bigger than nationalism, but it was a total rape of our identity, and it completely and forever changed the way that we as Jews see the world, whether we and our family was killed in the Holocaust or the neighbors’. ... the irony here is incredible–is how the Palestinians were impacted by the Nakba, having been forced to be refugees all around the world. And so ... to me it was like, why are you talking about the Holocaust? We won in the end. Look, we are so strong, we are in the Middle East, we have a nation. We won.
So as I was about to approach them with this big speech & at the very end of the tables was a different kind of table with a different kind of flag. And I thought, oh, maybe it’s not Israel Week; maybe it’s international week. So I went up to this table, and there was, like, a bunch of people there, and there was a bunch of books. And there’s this flag I’ve never seen before. And I came up to girl that was standing there, and I’m like, what’s this flag? And she ... stands up and she goes, hello, my name is Galia. I’m an anti-Zionist Jew. And this is the flag of Palestine.

...

And I found myself just exploding on this poor girl, just standing there, yelling at her, defending these idiots. What? Why would you bring this Arab propaganda? Why can’t we have just one week to ourselves to talk about Israel and to show Israel to the world? Why would you bring this Palestinian terrorism here? And I’m standing there yelling at her, and I’ll never forget the look on her face. ...

And I’m yelling at her and I’m yelling at her and I’m yelling at her, and she can’t get a word in. I don’t even think she said anything. I think she said, I’m an anti-Zionist Jew. I asked her, what is that? And she said something like, we believe in Palestinian human rights, I don’t know, something so banal that I would laugh at it if I saw it today. And yeah, and I just broke. I mean, I’m standing there yelling at her. And I ... think the reason I was yelling at her is because if you live in Israel-Palestine, we are in an active conflict–you eventually lose people. And if you live there long enough, you lose a lot of people.
...

And I’m standing there yelling at this girl in Canada, and I’m teleported to this moment, and I can smell it. And what was amazing is she’s standing there, and she comes from around the table, and she hugs me, and she says in Hebrew, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay. And I’m yelling at her, and the only thing I can think in my mind is everyone who died is your fault. And I don’t know why. Everyone I love. It’s your fault, ’cause you are defending this idea. And as we all know, the war of ideas is a lot more important than the war of bodies.

And that was the end for me. That was the end of something in which you could not ask, you could not touch, you could not criticize. There’s things you can criticize in Israel, but you can’t to criticize the bigger thing. You can’t talk about the bigger issues, the bigger problem. That was the end of that.
...

I mean, before that, whenever I’d talk to people, I’d be like, you don’t know anything; I lost someone in the terrorism. Everyone lost someone in terrorism. You know, you had 9/11; we had a hundred 9/11s; the Palestinians had 10,000 9/11s. America and–you invade not just people’s homes; you invade people’s lives, you tear apart their very belief in security, their very belief that they have a place in this world where they can go to sleep and wake up in the morning. That’s how profound your violence that you project on the world is and the violence that we project on the Palestinians is.

My little tragedy is nothing compared to the bigger picture. And yet it is only when you go to the root of this thing, you go deep into it, and you crack it, and you rip it right open to the point that you–only from that point can you build. And I was so lucky that I had someone like Galia to question me, ’cause this is the end of something, but it has to be the beginning of something else. She started giving me books. She started inviting me to lectures. She started forcing me to watch documentaries.

And the most important thing is she asked me questions. No one ever asked me real questions from a place of humility and empathy. People always told me what to think. They always told me that I was an Arab-hating Zionist. They never asked me, well, what do you think? Does any of what you say make sense to you? If you put A+B+C together, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, right? They only want to kill us; all of them just want to kill us; they don’t have any history; no, we can’t build a Zionist state if we don’t erase their history; there’s nothing to erase, ’cause they were never here. No, they were here, because–. None of it makes any logical line of sense until you start questioning it. And this is what she did for me. She forced me to start asking questions.

And I think that the most profoundly effective thing that growing up in Israel and Zionism in general has managed to achieve is that it taught all of us what questions we cannot ask, to a point that it is now a part of the Israeli DNA, knowing what questions you cannot ask, because once you start asking these questions, everything starts to unravel.
...

I think I am more pro-equality than I am anti-Zionist. I have nothing against spiritual Zionism and the belief that Jews have a place in Jerusalem and all of that narrative. I have no problem with that. I think that it should be open for all to live in and shared equally. My issue is with equality. In Israel it’s–we have institutional legal segregation inside of Israel.
...

There’s all these elements of inequality that I was completely unaware of. Yes, there’s a lot of denial, and we talked about that, but I didn’t know the facts, I didn’t know that we have more than 30 laws that on their surface, in their language, distinguish between Jewish and not-Jewish citizens.

So when Galia started me on this process of questioning, she introduced me to a lot of materials, and I could start asking questions. I started reading Israel’s laws. I started reading Israel’s land laws. I started seeking out all these holes in my education. And once you know, you can’t unknow. I mean, that’s the power of education. And it’s still–I mean, it’s like a spiral. She started me out of the cycle into a spiral, and I’m still on the spiral.
...

Does Israel Have a Right to Exist as a Jewish State? - Ali Abunimah on RAI

Continuing on with the interview of Ali Abunimah, this one I liked because of how he logically destroys the argument that Israel needs to exist because it is a place of refuge for all Jews in the world.

First of all, no one in the world has another country as an insurance policy that if something ever happens to someone in another country, they run back to another country. That other country is most likely of lower social & economic value. So, if a Jew / Israeli Zionist living in Toronto or Montreal or Chicago or Paris or Adelaide or Seoul ever feel threatened, then he / she has another developed country, Israel, as an insurance policy, where he / she can move to, with full citizenship rights, as soon as he / she steps on that land. That "insurance" is also maintained with heavy militarization & brutal control of its indigenous population, & that indigenous population doesn't have any citizenship rights in that country. Doesn't that sound like early European colonizations of North America, Australia, South Asia, Middle East, & the whole African continent, where Europeans brutally controlled the indigenous populations of these continents up until as recently as the mid-1900s? So, the early colonizers of the world are in full support of latest colonizers of Palestine. That's definitely "shared values," & in some respect, even "shared history."

Secondly, what really struck home with what Abunimah says that how Israel can say that it is a safe refuge for all Jews of the world & then essentially contradict that by saying that it is a country which is under constant threat of annihilation by its Arab neighbours. If it's under constant threat of annihilation, then it cannot be a safe refuge.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0YfWpiPDU0

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... in chapter two, Ali discusses does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state. And here's a quote from that chapter:

States either exist or do not exist, as other states either recognize them or they do not. But no other state has claimed the abstract right to exist. If Israel is indeed a normal state among the nations, as its Zionist founders wished it to be, then it has no greater "right to exist" than East Germany, Czechoslovakia, South Vietnam, or the Soviet Union. All those states dissolved, and there's no one with any standing to bring a case in any form demanding they be resurrected on any abstract right to exist separate from their legitimate residents' right to self-determination.

So the right of the Jewish state to exist is usually stated as something based in something--what they would say would be unique, which is the Holocaust, or the genocide against Jews in World War II, that--they would argue, I would say, defenders of the Jewish state, that this isn't like a Soviet Union or any of these other places; because of this genocide, Jews need this state to defend them because of hundreds and even thousands of years of discrimination in Europe. So what do you make of that argument? 'Cause they do see the Israeli state as an exceptional case.

ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, I actually discuss all those claims in the book and, I think, address them fairly systematically.

But a basic point is that, of course, historically Zionism began--yes, it began as a response to the systematic persecution that Jews faced in Europe. It was rejected by most Jews at the time, and, in fact, for many decades. But it started long before the Holocaust. I mean, the Holocaust would be a sort of a post hoc justification for Zionism, given that the two are separated by many decades.

But I question the claim that the way for Jews to have security and to feel secure is through an exclusivist state that requires so much violence against the Palestinians. And it required immense violence to create it, because, of course, Palestinians were the majority in the area that became Israel. And it requires immense violence to maintain it, because I think Israel's struggle over the past few decades has been, really, to conceal from the world the amount of violence that is needed to maintain an exclusivist state in a geographic area that didn't have a Jewish majority, and today, where Jews are at most 50% of the population, if not already a minority.

And so this requires you to think about different ways of organizing life so that you don't have this constant combat to maintain the supremacy of one group over another.

JAY: Well, just to give the argument, I know people ... that support a Jewish state will give the argument, it could happen again, what happened in Europe. And, actually, you can see the rise of fascism in Europe again in Ukraine and in France, and also in Germany and other places. And this idea that's fairly deeply rooted because of what happened during World War II, certainly in the Israeli public opinion, to some extent in Jews outside of Israel and North America, that there's this place of refuge--and there's certainly this idea that this tiny little state is surrounded by this far, far larger Arab population, and only through having essentially a militarized state could you have a safe haven. I mean, that's the psyche.

ABUNIMAH: Well, there's a number of claims there. First of all, you have to examine from a moral and ethical point of view the notion that Jewish Americans or Jewish Canadians should have a spare country as an insurance policy when the creation and maintenance of this spare country comes at a brutal price and brutal suffering of its indigenous people, who have to be expelled, kept as refugees, corralled in ghettos like Gaza or Qalqilya, treated as second-class citizens, and constantly demonized. Is that ethically a price that anyone should be asked to pay as an insurance policy for people living quite comfortably in Montreal or Chicago or other parts of the world? I think that's questionable.

The other point is that even if one accepts the premise, there's a basic contradiction in the Israeli narrative, or the Zionist narrative, of Israel as a safe haven and a final refuge for Jews should things go bad in other parts of the world, and the propaganda message that Israel is under constant threat, constantly beset by enemies, whether it's Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza or Iran's nuclear weapons, and is always on the brink of destruction. I mean, it can't be both. It can't be both a safe place and this dangerous place.

And to the extent that Israel has become, really, the most dangerous place in the world for Jews, one has to examine what are the dynamics, what are the structures, what are the realities that perpetuate conflict and bloodshed and hostility, and I would argue, and I do argue, that it is the effort to create and maintain an exclusivist state at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population, a colonial state, and therefore the way to undo this hostility is through decolonization, is through going forward to a situation and, in a sense, returning to a situation where Jews and Palestinians can be part of the same entity, and to do away with this notion of Palestinians as a demographic threat, which is how the Israeli mainstream talks about them in which I understand to be really racist language. But it's how even many liberal supporters of a Jewish state talk that we have to maintain a Jewish majority.

What's the price of maintaining it? How do you do that? What remedies do you have if Palestinians have too many of the wrong kind of baby? It creates an ugliness and a violence that I think many liberal Jewish supporters of Israel in this country and around the world have refused to recon with. And they think that this can all just be wished away by continuously repeating these slogans about two states living side by side in peace and never having to reckon with the reality of what ethnic segregation means in Palestine. It means ethnic cleansing. It means violence. It means racist laws. It means constantly viewing Palestinians as a presence that pollutes the land.

JAY: The idea of the need for a Jewish state, not a secular state, not a modern democratic state--as many people say, you can't have a modern democratic state and an ethnic-based state. Now, Israel's not the only one. You have the Islamic Republic of Iran and you have Pakistan and other countries that consider themselves religious-based, and it amounts to a large extent ethnic-based--certainly in Iran it does. I think the Iranians see it as much a Persian state as they do an Islamic state, and their laws are like that, in the sense that if you're of any kind of Iranian descent, if you have Persian blood in you, if you are Canadian and go back to Iran, they will consider you Iranian one way or the other.

ABUNIMAH: But that's not--you know, I always find it interesting when people defend Israel based on comparisons with countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran as if those are models that anyone aspires to or defends in terms of--. Israel compares itself to Western liberal democracies. It doesn't say, we're like Iran or we're like Saudi Arabia.

But the claim that Israel is, for example, the law of return that you're alluding to is just like a law that says that somebody of Irish descent can go back and get an Irish passport is a fallacy that I take on in the book. The example of Ireland comes up all the time. Ireland has a law that says, if you have one grandparent born on the island of Ireland, then you can go and claim Irish citizenship. And some people say, well, this justifies things like Israel's law of return for Jews. No, it's totally different, because the Irish law doesn't contain any provision that you have to be Catholic or you have to be Celtic or some other ethnoreligious criteria. If you're Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was from any kind of background, you qualify, whereas the Israeli law is designed to give privileges to people Israel identifies as Jewish, wherever they are in the world, and specifically to deny them to Palestinians who are born in the country or whose parents or grandparents are born there. So I'm not here to defend other states and to say that other states are our models.

My rant on Refugee crisis (second one)

Few points were mulling around in my head after continuously reading comments & social media posts that Muslims & Arab countries are not doing enough to ease the refugee crisis from Iraq & Syria:

1. Muslim countries have taken millions of refugees:
Although, Muslim countries can certainly do more, they are/have done a lot already. Syrians are taking refuge in Turkey (1.9 million refugees), Jordan (650K), & Lebanon (1.3 million) for the past 3 years. That totals up to 4 Million refugees in 3 Muslim countries alone. Source: UNHCR

From a Sept 4th article on Bloomberg, "Nabil Othman, acting regional representative to the Gulf region at the United Nations' refugee agency, UNHCR, told Bloomberg there were 500,000 Syrians in that country [Saudi Arabia]. Saudi Arabia, like all of the Gulf states, is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention, so these displaced people are not officially designated as refugees." Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait & UAE have not taken refugees themselves, but UAE, Kuwait & Qatar, for example, are providing financial help to refugees through UNHCR. These countries have donated millions of $$$. These countries are smaller in size & cannot cope with a large influx of refugees. Those refugees will overwhelm their local economies & labour markets.

2. Quite a few of the refugees entering in Europe are actually just getting there to search for a better economic life. They are taking this issue as a perfect opportunity to enter Western developed countries without all the hassles of immigration process. They are not running away from Syria to save their lives. For example, the instigator of this issue, Abdullah Kurdi's family (Aylan Kurdi's family), was already safe in Turkey since 2012.

After all, why are Afghanis & even Pakistanis & Bangladeshis are in these refugee crowds who are trying to enter into Europe. Afghanis have claimed asylum in Pakistan & in Iran for decades, now. It's easier for Afghanis to enter into Pakistan & Iran as refugees than go all the way to Europe. Same question can be asked for Pakistani & Bangladeshi "refugees". These are not refugees. They are "economic opportunists." That's why, European government leaders are now trying to distinguish between the words, "migrants" & "refugees". Angela Merkel even said that all those "refugees" from Balkans will be sent back (which emphasizes my point that people into Germany & Austria are not all "refugees"). David Cameron emphasized that UK will only take "refugees," & not migrants looking for a better life.

3. Pope's call is similar to all those Christian missionary teams which used to go to Africa, South America, South East Asia. It was famous that these missionaries were brutal in their faith conversion tactics; accept Christianity & we will give you food & shelter or don't accept Christianity & you won't get anything. Of course, Pope's call is not that radical, but there are already stories coming out that some Iranians & Afghanis are converting to Christianity. (Source: Daily Mail) Their thinking is that as Christians, they can easily claim asylum in Europe by claiming that they fear persecution in Middle East.

4. Germany is taking almost 800K refugees because it has a hidden agenda: Germany is running a huge shortfall of labourers & it needs low-tech workers for its workforce. Every refugee wants to eventually work, & unlike, Arab countries, where the majority of population is young & educated, European countries are aging & need younger workforce. Although, Jordan, Lebanon, & Turkey are housing these refugees, these refugees are not allowed to work there. Most of the Western countries, depending on their own labour markets & economies, will either permanently resettle some refugees or send these refugees back to their countries of origins after a certain amount of time has passed.

Some points on why Arab countries are silent on issue of refugee crisis

Although, this opinion piece in Reuters is discussing an issue unrelated to the migrant crisis & Gulf Arab's deafening silence on this issue of the day, it does point out some problems / threats that Saudi Arabia, the richest Gulf Arab country, is suffering from. I think these are some of the threats which are also causing leaders of the Gulf Arab states to remain silent. Of course, it is oversimplification of the complex issues.

These threats, as the opinion piece points out, are:

1. a high number of youths in its population: "more than half of the country’s population of 29 million is under the age of 25. Two-thirds of the population is under 30. The estimated unemployment rate for Saudis aged 15 to 24 is about 30%."

That stats is pretty much same all across the Gulf Arab states; UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, & even Egypt. Universities are opening up in these countries & youths are getting education, but their unemployment rate is still quite high. This was one of the primary reasons why Egyptian youths started protesting against Egypt's Mubarak's regime & ultimately took it down.

These Arab states are fearful that if they let in thousands upon thousands of Syrian, Afghani, Somalian, Sudanese, & Iraqi refugees in their countries, the country's youths may rise up against the regime when they are still unemployed & may see refugees working. By the way, Syrian & Iraqi refugees are not allowed to work in Jordan & Turkey.

Some may say that refugees only want a safe place to live. Not exactly. Refugees also want to work. Unless, a country can cope with letting thousands of refugees in the labour force, most countries will stop the refugees from working, & that will be the next thing refugees will want to do; to work.

2. high dependence on oil revenues for government coffers: when 90% of government coffers are dependent on oil revenues & oil prices being so low for the foreseeable future, these governments will not want more people in their country, esp. when such people will need help; the help which will cost a whole lot of moolah. Having said that, Arab monarchs are full of money, which Western leaders are not.

Western countries, on the other hand, have diversified economies. Their economies are not dependent on only one industry. So, to help out millions of refugees (& yes, there are millions of refugees), Arab leaders have to dip into their own personal pockets, which they most likely don't want to do & won't do it.

3. No tax policies in Gulf Arab states: these Arab countries don't have any tax policies, so they can't exactly raise taxes on the public & businesses to absorb the costs of housing refugees.

However, the Western countries can, & will, raise taxes on the public to absorb the costs of housing refugees. Of course, that's assuming, that Western countries accept millions of refugees. A few thousands neither would cost Western countries & nor would affect any of the GCC countries' government coffers.

At the end of the day, housing refugees is not a permanent solution. It's a Band-Aid solution. It's a temporary solution. A permanent solution is to work towards ending the conflict altogether. That's where, the Arab countries have the most influence & can do the most. Up to now, these countries are also the ones who were supplying weapons to Iraq & Syria; essentially, igniting the flames further. They need to do the opposite, but will they? I don't think so because those actions will clash with their vision of controlling the region & turning its politics in their own favour. End result: many more refugees will keep producing in middle east.

'Islam at war' vs 'War within Islam'

A great opinion piece.

Everyone in the West, from the TV pundits, liberals or neo-conservatives, to the general masses, always have the same comments, "Muslims are not doing enough against extremism in the Middle East."

As the piece correctly points out that Muslims in the Middle East can't even protest for their basic rights to, for instance, jobs, & the people in the West are asking them to protest against ISIS & Al Qaeda. After all, being a moron has no limits.

On top of that, as the piece correctly points out, if Muslims are being asked to speak out against extremism in Islam, then why aren't Christians, Jews, agnostics, & atheists are being asked to protest against Zionism & Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Many people consider Israel as an occupier but can't say a damn word against it. Heck, in many Western countries, saying anything against Israeli occupation is labelled as, "anti-Semitism," & it's illegal to be an anti-Semitic in North America (but it's ok to be a racist).

As I have blogged previously that if the world wants peace anywhere, & especially in the Middle East, the Western powers should stop interfering in internal matters of those countries. Muslims in those countries can, & would love to protest, but thanks to the armament supply from UK, US, China, Russia, Israel, Sweden, Germany, France etc. that the citizens & residents of those Middle Eastern countries are forcibly sent home or to prisons.

If the Western developed countries stop supporting the Middle Eastern countries or Central American countries or South American countries or SouthEast Asian countries or African countries today, by stopping their weapons sales, political analysts & envoys, & of course, spies from ever entering into these developing countries, & let these developing countries develop & learn by themselves, then we will have peace in this world at that moment.
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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/04/war-islam-150429052909631.html

Not a day passes without certain pundits sharing their newfound "insights" about Islam; "Islam at war", "Islam's war within", or "Islam's inherent violence", etc.
 
These headlines & their derivatives are neither new nor original, & despite being repeated countless times in the West, they remain fashionable. Partly because of what they say about the continued escalation in violence in the region, but more importantly for what they say about their manufacturers.
 
These can be divided into 2 opposing camps, but they have more in common than meets the eye.
 
The first camp claims "Islam is at war" & demands that the West respond with more of the same, war. It advocates deliberate, sustained & wide ranging use of force against Islamic radicals & their sponsors anywhere they might be.
 
Its proponents criticise the Obama administration's strategic restraint & condemn its withdrawal from Iraq & its retreat or redeployment in the rest of the region.
 
'ISIL is not Islamic'
 
They also question US President Barack Obama's judgement that ISIL "is not Islamic" & ridicule his administration's claim that the terrorists are the "enemies of Islam".
 
In their mind, Islamism is an ideology that preaches extremism & terrorism & must be confronted & eradicated by force. Some go as far as to claim that Islam as a religion spouts hate & breeds violence & therefore must be radically reformed and/or confronted head on.
 
The most vocal among these are the ultra Zionists & neo-conservatives. They reckon "cowardice & multiculturalism" is partially to blame for the leadership failure to confront Islam, & warn against the dangers of abandoning "moderate" allies & emboldening the Islamic radicals throughout the world.
 
They insist the West must emulate Israel's aggressive tactics & war strategies throughout the globe.
 
The liberal or realist camp argues that Islam is waging a war with itself, which the West cannot hope to win & therefore shouldn't get involved in, except when US national security is directly threatened.
 
When it comes to Islamism, its advocates reckon military force is not sufficient or adequate to fight an ideology; & that only Muslims can, & should, engage in their own battles militarily & otherwise. The West can only help them fight.
 
In the words of Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, the realists are right about this: The US & its NATO partners cannot "win" the war inside Islam.
 
This is ever more so when it comes to the cross-regional sectarian conflict between Shia Muslims & Sunnis. Whether Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc, the liberals warn it's short-sighted as it's dangerous to interfere militarily in what essentially is a civil war within Islam.
 
They argue the West must draw the right conclusions from its failures over the past dozen years & avoid overextending its military footprint in the greater Middle East region.
 
Where are the Muslims?
 
Liberals & especially liberal Zionists, who oppose direct interference, have criticised Muslims for shying away from getting directly involved against religious extremists.
 
"There is a cancer of extremism within Islam today," wrote Fareed Zakaria. "A small minority of Muslims celebrates violence & intolerance & harbours deeply reactionary attitudes towards women & minorities. While some confront these extremists, not enough do so, & the protests are not loud enough."
 
"Islam is in crisis, a religion at war with itself," argued Roger Cohen & added: "The West is a spectator to this internal conflict & a victim of it. Up to now, the reaction of Muslims to the horrors committed in the name of an ideology of hate & death drawn from a certain reading of Islamic texts has been pitiful."
 
His colleague, Thomas Friedman went further. Muslims need to organise "a million-person march against the jihadists across the Arab-Muslim world, organised by Arabs & Muslims for Arabs & Muslims, without anyone in the West asking for it".
 
I don't know where these Western liberals (who don't speak any of the regional languages) get the idea that Muslims do not speak out against extremists. If anything, Muslims are the harshest enemies, bravest fighters & worst victims of extremism.
 
Are they at least aware that Muslims cannot demonstrate in much of the Arab World?
 
On the other hand, if it's so easy to demonstrate in New York & Los Angeles, why aren't they calling on the Jewish majorities to demonstrate against Zionism & in favour of peace & a two-state solution.
 
That's not to say there are no radicals, extremists & fundamentalists like ISIL & al-Qaeda, but the real major problems facing the Arab today goes beyond religious texts.
 
Frustrating frustration
 
There's something terribly annoying about the repetitiveness & recklessness of those who invoke Islam with each & every issue confronting the greater Middle East region. Even more irritating is their attempt to repackage their arguments in an aura of originality.
 
But while doing my research, I drew solace from the fact that I am not alone in my frustration. As Rami Khouri put it: "We suffer enough stress & danger in the Arab region from political violence, ageing tyrants, foreign invasions, local criminal & militia groups, colonial settler expansions, & frayed, haemorrhaging socioeconomic systems that we do not need this added intellectual bludgeoning by the international battalions of perplexity & confusion who find comfort in old-fashioned wholesale racism & reductionism ['Islam is this, Islam is that'] that explains nothing other than their own bewilderment."
 
I wonder whether it's bewilderment or opportunism.
 
Remember, the Friedmans & the Zakarias of Western punditry, who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq among other post 9/11 military adventures, are scapegoating Muslims for theirs & their government's follies.
 
They deflect Western geopolitical failures on Islam; failures & blunders that culminated in evermore antagonisms & divisions.
 
And they complain about how Muslims don't speak loud enough against the extremists, when Muslims are the foremost victims of extremism.
 
It's the context, dummy
 
It's rather cruel to ask Muslims to demonstrate against the recent killings in Paris, for example, when they can't even demonstrate against the mass murder in their own homelands. They can't even demonstrate for jobs & justice.
 
Moreover, why are Muslims asked to demonstrate against religious extremism while Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, & Muslims are not asked to demonstrate against Israeli occupation or speak against Western wars & global injustice?
 
There's no doubt that unlike the neo-conservatives, liberals' approach to the Muslim world tends to be more rational, less militarist & less racist, albeit with hypocritical twist of self-endowed surplus morality.
 
However, both camps look at the region through imperial lenses. Both evade responsibility for their role in the terrible state of affairs in the greater Middle East.
 
But after decades of colonial invasions, interventions, & occupations, neither camp should be surprised that Muslims have a long memory & deep distrust of Western motives when it comes to provoking war or invoking Islam.
 

Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.

"Buying Halal Certified" by Peter Broelman

"Buying Halal Certified" - Peter Broelman, Australia

Robert Fisk in Abu Dhabi: The acceptable face of the Emirates

My questions after reading this opinion piece from Robert Fisk are:

1. How Oriental & Western paintings, & Gauguin, Picasso, & Poussin art is going to help educate the Arabs?

2. What's the point of this education when it doesn't help broaden the mind to discuss political, social, cultural, & religious matters openly (instead of one family dictatorship rule)?

3. What's the point of all this educational institutions when Arabs, & Muslims, most likely, have forgotten how Prophet Muhammad used to live & they are spending billions on gigantic mosques to show what to whom?

As Mr. Fisk very aptly asks, "what to make of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque? The truly gigantic carpet, the chandeliers, the fact that it was constructed by men & materials from Morocco to China & can hold more than 40,000 faithful – all give it the feel of cathedrals built in the Middle Ages. It has avoided the gruesome, concrete pseudo-modernism of the Saudi-built mosques of Bosnia, but is it art? Or, with its gold and precious stones, is it a message about the power of wealth as well as the power of God? The Prophet Mohamed was a businessman & he would, I suspect, have rather liked Abu Dhabi – but Mohamed was also a humble man. Is this mosque humble?"

And while UAE spends billions on grand mosques & building Louvres & Guggenheims "for educational purposes," thousands upon thousands of Muslims are getting killed in South East Asia (Rohingya) to Iraq to Libya, & millions more are refugees. I am not even going to discuss the plights of Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, & Xinjiang etc.

4. What's the point of this education when those same Arab elites are forcing thousands of foreign workers from South & Central Asia to work in extreme heat of the Middle East, to build these grand mosques, museums, roads, buildings, & essentially, whole cities in the middle of desert, for meagre wages & at great risks to their lives?

5. What's the point of such education which doesn't help one learn the meaning of justice, equality, & basic humanity?

I guess, I can't really pin that one on Emiratis or Arabs only, since this is all over the world. There are far more "educated" people now in this so-called "modern" world than, say, 1900s, but the suffering & plight of our fellow human beings have increased that much in only a century.

Didn't this modern "education" increase injustice, inequality, & erased the meaning of humanity from the public's minds?

So what's the point of such education when it only increases suffering, further traps the public in the flawed system (poor can't get good quality education because of its unaffordability & the rich don't really need it in the first place) & the overall system doesn't change at all since education doesn't help in broadening the mind?
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/robert-fisk-in-abu-dhabi-the-acceptable-face-of-the-emirates-10211050.html

The Abu Dhabi Louvre looks like the top of a giant, primordial eggshell pushing its way out of the sand. Its giant dome already glisters under the sun, its construction workers moving like spiders over 5 layers of cladding, steel & aluminium which will give this extraordinary museum a combined weight of 7,000 tons, just a little less than the Eiffel Tower. Already the concrete base of a man-made lake spreads around the construction, for architect Jean Nouvel's Louvre will be on a miniature island, its works of art transported to its gallery through an underground tunnel, light sprinkled into its interior as if through the fronds of palm trees.
 
Very romantic. Very French orientalist, I say to myself. Very Arab too, perhaps. The idea is that art will move chronologically through centuries inside the new Louvre, oriental & Western paintings next to each other.
 
But won't Abu Dhabi have a few problems with nudes, with Gauguin or Picasso or Poussin? No, says my companion, as he explains the double insulation & the cladding which will ... prevent water spewing on to the Louvre's greatest masterpieces. "All that is accepted. This is art. This is for education." Contemporary art will be inside the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim a few hundred yards away, still just a sand-pile of dumper trucks & bobbing labourers' hats.
 
... so many people in Abu Dhabi don't like their names being revealed – my companion included – for they live under a form of autocracy; not the dictatorship of Saddamite or Mubarakite or Ghaddafite political power, but the dictatorship of money. Abu Dhabi is so rich, & its ambitions so mystical, that people speak in whispers. If the Abu Dhabi Louvre has already purchased Gauguin's Breton Boys Wrestling ... & Magritte's The Subjugated Reader ... then perhaps some miracle has taken place.
 
But if all this is educational, what to make of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque? The truly gigantic carpet, the chandeliers, the fact that it was constructed by men & materials from Morocco to China & can hold more than 40,000 faithful – all give it the feel of cathedrals built in the Middle Ages. It has avoided the gruesome, concrete pseudo-modernism of the Saudi-built mosques of Bosnia, but is it art? Or, with its gold & precious stones, is it a message about the power of wealth as well as the power of God? The Prophet Mohamed was a businessman & he would, I suspect, have rather liked Abu Dhabi – but Mohamed was also a humble man. Is this mosque humble?
 
That's the catch in Abu Dhabi. When you own 9% of the world's oil & close to 5% of the planet's natural gas, you have to decide whether you shout about it, display it before all with Saudi abandon, or send it off to fund charitable projects or cult-like Islamist militias. Abu Dhabi has stuck to charity, avoided the darkness of Wahabism, ... but can't shake off the need for ostentation. And the Emirates Palace Hotel is an obscenity. I've stayed there twice ... & I've written of its imperial architecture – Mogul-Gothic Lutyens, I suppose, with just a hint of Saddam & just a dangerous flavour of Titanic.
 
This is egregious affluence on an unprecedented scale, real gold on the walls, doors & fittings, 1,022 crystal chandeliers & a guest list of Hollywood-Bollywood glamerati who've taken rooms at up to £10,000 a night. So gargantuan is the wretched hotel's size that no guest can escape walking 2 miles a day; the Egyptian & Russian staff call it the "Hotel Sporto" because most have to walk between 10 & 15 miles a day escorting guests.
 
This, however, is being picky. Old Sheikh Zayed, the founder of Abu Dhabi, his son & successor, the current Sheikh Khalifa, & now his brother, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, have all said that the Emirates lagged behind in that most precious, & largely absent, commodity of any Arab state: education. Now that Abu Dhabi had "a lot of wealth" ... the emirate needed to invest in education, Prince Mohammed told a summit 2 months ago. "Maybe in 50 years, we might have the last barrel of oil. The question is: will we be sad? If today we are investing in the right sectors, we will celebrate at that moment."
 
Abu Dhabi is the sensible, adult version of Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, smaller than its neighbour, but probably the wealthiest city in the world. It's still ruled by the al-Nahyan family whose Bani Yas tribe migrated to the north Arabian peninsula Gulf coast, opposite what is now Iran, in the late 18th century. So rich is Abu Dhabi, with an oil producing capacity of 2.3 million barrels a day, that even its total investments – statistics it prefers to keep secret – must be calculated to the nearest £70bn. The total figure is probably close to £650bn.
 
In the awful corporate language that crown princes now feel constrained to speak, Prince Mohammed said that, while Abu Dhabi possessed oil & gas for the present, "We need as of today to stress that learning outcomes should create human capital that is able to serve us for the 50 years & beyond." In other words, education, education, education…

What on earth, I asked Zaki Nusseibeh, one of the advisers to the government's cultural affairs ministry, was Prince Mohammed banging on about? "The Arab peoples in their revolutions asked for dignity," he replied. "They asked for a future. But… you need to create the 'custom' for discussion & for accepting other people's point of view. All that is happening with religious ideology in this part of the world is a fascist movement. Teaching is by rote – I mean this, by rote – & people are not encouraged to have critical thinking. They don't listen to music at a young age or know what it's like to go to a museum. Sheikh Zayed said this as early as 1968."
 
Mr Nusseibeh sits on a Rhodes Scholarship committee & says how rewarding it is to see two young UAE students competing with international students, to see them go to Oxford to get their Masters. So Abu Dhabi & the other emirates must have good universities, he says, fine schools, a commitment to "education & culture". Investing in the future, every Abu Dhabi government official will tell you, is also about renewable energy, solar energy, but it's primarily about education.
 
"Political ideology has taken over from education," Mr Nusseibeh says of recent Arab history. He talks of the museums & the Biennale in Sharjah & Abu Dhabi & then blurts out one of those clichés which always make me suspicious: that Abu Dhabi must be "a role model for the societies around us – look at the media, the internet city, the communications infrastructure…"

It's not long ago that the West told the Arabs that Turkey should be their role model – until Recep Tayyip Erdogan started going bonkers, talking about plots & locking up journalists & turning into a role model for the Mubaraks & Ghaddafis that had already passed into history. Yet it's not difficult to see what Abu Dhabi is trying to do. If Saudi Arabia is the empire of prayer & Qatar the empire of television ... then Abu Dhabi runs the empire of higher education, the one commodity which has always failed the Arabs, or which the Arabs have always failed to take advantage of.
 
From education comes dignity & from dignity comes justice. But this is surely too sentimental. It's glorious to know that in Abu Dhabi there is an Abu Dhabi Choral Group, an Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation, an Amadeus Music Institute, a House of Oud, studying the Arabic stringed instrument which is a distant relative of the lute, the International Music Institute & the Modern Art Music Institute. But then I find Abu Dhabi's version of Time Out lists 108 bars & nightclubs in its entertainment inventory. Is it trying to imitate Dubai? Can there be two Dubais – or two Abu Dhabis – in the Emirates?
 
And who are they ultimately for? Not for the 4 million foreign labourers, of course. Nor for the middle-class elites who arrive from the West & from the rest of that amorphous "Arab world". An Iraqi high-up in the medical profession in Abu Dhabi – which is why he, too, asked to remain anonymous – explained his relationship with the Emirate in surprisingly frank terms. "We all came here by choice," he said over the hottest coffee I've ever tasted in Arabia. "I made an informed decision – I believed I would have a better life here. I'm very happy with the way they run their country."
 
He paused here, I think because – as a doctor as well as an expatriate – he didn't want to give Abu Dhabi too clean a bill of health. "The deal is this: 'We're going to pay you money & you can have the lifestyle you have chosen – but you have no rights.' A non-Emirati cannot go to a government school. You can only go to a government hospital in emergency. I'm here as a servant of the country. I know if I don't want to be a servant any more, I can get on a plane & go home."
 
Then he thought for a moment & captured the venality of it all. "We're all here by invitation – or temptation."