The Empire hiding in plain sight (revisited)

My favourite article on Guerre and Shalom's 100th birthday

PROLOGUE BY THE EDITOR:

Today is the 100th edition of Guerre and Shalom. It’s been quite a ride. We’ve had articles, poetry and letters. We’ve had guest contributors from Canada, Israel and the USA. We’ve talked of geopolitics and science-fiction; Scotland and Brexit. We’ve delved into history and discovered the meaning of leadership. We’ve unearthed the Enlightenment and defined the concept of peace. And the United Nations has been well and truly (and deservedly) trashed. But among the analysis of the Israel-Gaza war, the proposals submitted for Middle Eastern Peace and the lament over the decline of liberal democracy lurks my favourite submission.

In some ways it was very difficult to select just one piece to republish for our 100th birthday. But in other ways it was très facile; as this article really sticks out in my mind. It deals with the unspoken truth: that the Arab World is nothing more and nothing less than an Empire; an extinguisher of native Middle Eastern and North African self-determination and an imperial project in need of decolonisation. It’s continuing presence as a united (-ish) geopolitical block is harmful to world peace and destructive to non-Arab culture in the birthplace of multiple civilisations.

Enjoy the article. Subscribe if you haven’t done so already. And remember that this is a community; we are always on the look out for high quality writing from well-regarded thinkers. I look forward to receiving your submissions.

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[Image: Nasser of Egypt, the ultimate Arab imperialist. Retrieved from atlanticcouncil.org ]

THE EMPIRE HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Introduction: The most successful empire

There have been many mighty empires to stride the face of the Earth. Some came and went in the blinking of an eye and are buried in the deepest recesses of our collective memory. Others left an indelible mark, but took a bow in face of the oncoming arrow of history.

 The Mongol hordes brought their terror from China via Persia and Russia to Europe and galloped all the way to the Middle East. No country can claim to have achieved world domination, but the Mongols came mighty close. The name Khan - sprinkled liberally among the surnames of Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, Jews and even some Spaniards - is testament to a legacy unsurpassed in Empire Building. 

The British ruled the waves and perhaps we communicate in English right now - under the protection of the rule of law, democracy and relative freedom - due to their influence. Yet the unwanted economic domination of the world by one small European nation has had its day. It too retreated from the world stage in a wave of decolonization. 

But both the Mongols and the British are overshadowed by the most successful Empire of all time. An Empire that exists to this very day. An Empire so insidious that it has gaslit the world into believing that it is no empire at all. That they are the native people of all of the Middle East and North Africa and most audaciously of all that they are at the forefront of the fight against “Western imperialism”. I speak, of course, of Pax Arabica. The Arab imperium. And its governing council “The Arab League”.

The nature of the Arab Empire and its modern impact

Let us speak frankly. The Arabs are from Arabia. Not from Israel nor Mesopotamia. Not from Morocco nor Lebanon. With the wind of Islam on their backs, they invaded, settled and colonised the Levant and imposed their will from India to Spain. If they had not been defeated at the history-defining Battle of Tours (by the Franks), all of Europe would today be under their theocratic and pan-Arabist grip. The Berbers in Morocco, the Africans of Sudan, the Kurds, Yazidis and Arameans in Northern Iraq, the Maronites and Druze of Lebanon, the Jews of Israel: These are famous examples of the dominated indigenous peoples whose countries have been torn apart by Arab domination, colonisation, dictatorship and neglect.  Jews who have spent millenia in these lands have been ethnically cleansed and such is the sword of Damocles that hangs over every single group who fails to submit to the second class citizenship dished out by the Arab-Islamic Empire. Pay your Jizya tax. Don’t build any more non-Islamic houses of worship. Accept being defined as an Arab. Speak the Arabic imperial language. Be good “guests”. And you will be tolerated…for now. 

There have been reverses, the most famous of which was the Spanish reconquista. But, for the most part, the Arab colossus has held firm. The Crusaders, far from being “foreign invaders”, were trying to recreate the status quo ante and reestablish Christendom in Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Arab imperial conquests (albeit now under the control of the Pope, not under Constantinople). 

Ultimately though, it was a failure.  A Jew at the time would have been happy to see the fall of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Just as they would have wept at the chains imposed by Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella in the year that Grenada fell. Better to be a second class citizen in a Muslim Empire than not be able to step foot in Jerusalem under Byzantium. However the wheel of history has turned. I write now from the former Taifa of Zaragoza, one of the outmost provinces of Arab rule. The day is cursed by the chillingly cold “Cierzo” breeze, as freezing now as in the era when the Arabs christened the city “The Bride of the Wind”. Yet though my ancestors were driven from this self-same Catholic Spain, I cannot but be glad that today I live independent of the Arab-Islamic Empire in a country of freedom and liberty.

And this isn’t ancient history. It is a modern reality. A professor at Cambridge university - an Iraqi asylum seeker to the UK and an acquaintance of mine - recalls having to define himself as ‘Arab’ on his passport: “to keep Saddam happy”. I struggled to find a single person willing to define themselves as ‘Arab’ in Marrakesh. And when the distinctly African-looking Anwar El-Sadat decided to put the national interests of recovering Egyptian land first: Boom! How very dare he? No-one defies Arab imperial interests! No-one stands in the way of expelling the rebellious, non-Arab “Zionist entity” from the heart of the Empire!  He had to be stopped. The PLO-arm of the imperial militia carried out the 1978 Coastal Massacre attack on Israeli territory. And ultimately the brave Egyptian nationalist leader was assassinated for having the audacity to accept the independence of Jewish Judea from the Imperium.

Sudan and the meaning of Jihad

The nature of the Arab Empire is intimately tied to the concept of Jihad which is nothing less than the expansion of this pan-national entity by force.  An expansion which continues to this very day. As we speak, in Sudan, the Arab imperial forces are targeting black Africans, the Masalit. They are attempting, with increasing ferocity, to destroy a bastion of non-Arab culture and to ethnically cleanse the recalcitrant natives . To quote an article by Tasha Kheiriddin (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/tasha-kheiriddin-africans-are-being-slaughtered-but-with-no-jews-to-blame-the-left-shrugs):

“Since July, over 9000 people have been killed in Sudan and 5.6 million displaced due to fighting between the Arab paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army. … Just two weeks ago, they murdered over 1,000 Masalit in 24 hours in the Ardamata refugee camp. And it promises to only get worse.

The world has seen this movie before. Between 2003 and 2008, 300,000 Masalit were murdered and 2.5 million displaced by the Janjaweed, an Arab militia force. Former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir unleashed these terrorists to crush Darfuri rebel groups who were revolting against the neglect of the region’s Black African population. Today’s RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, are reportedly drawn from this group of Janjaweed fighters.

And their tactics are brutal. Researchers at the Center for Information Resilience verified videos of militiamen rounding up and whipping Masalit men in Ardamata. One video shows men being struck with rifles by uniformed men, some wearing the RSF insignia, who called their victims “sons of dogs.” The RSF reportedly targets men and boys, to take their land and wipe them out as an Indigenous Darfuri group.”

Many would argue that jihad is a term for internal struggle: the battle to defeat the evil within us. And it is certainly true that as Islam expanded from beyond the Middle East to Persia and India, it combined with the ancient cultures there to become a more spiritual endeavour. Mystical Sufi Islam is the embodiment of Islam as internal reformation and spiritual evolution. And any Iranian knows that Cyrus the Great is as much part of their extraordinary national story as Islam and they combine together in such a way that religion is just one facet of their national identity. Arabia may have its satellite states as did the Soviet Union, but none of those countries have totally forgotten where they came from.

But when it comes to Islam within the borders of the Arab Empire, it is and has always been a political project. By their own admission, Arabia before Islam was a tribal society of no regional (let alone international) significance. The Sassanids and Byzantines lived and fought each other with almost no regard to their Arabian neighbours except and unless they needed to find an alternative silk road to the East during times of tension. Islam changed everything. It united the Arabs and it destroyed all before it. The Persian Sassanids and the Byzantines Christians fell away in its wake. But without Islam, there is no Arab power. What would be left? An enormous oil-drenched sand dune with a penchant for terrorist training camps. Unlike the Persians or Pakistanis, there is no Arab cultural hinterland before Islam. So the Empire must be maintained. There is no other way.

Palestinians: A nation? Or the vanguard of the Empire?

(i) The PLO

The Palestinian national movement is at the forefront of these Arab imperial efforts. This is not my opinion. It is written explicitly in the charters of both the secular PLO and the Islamist Hamas. In the PLO Charter of 1968, the emphasis on the Arab nation over any Palestinian nation is striking. Indeed, the phrase "Palestinian nation" is never mentioned once.

Article 1 states “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”

ARAB Palestinian people. Part of the greater ARAB homeland.  Integral part of the greater ARAB nation. For better or worse, whatever the historical accuracy of this statement,  the PLO of 1968 saw itself as a branch of the wider, pan-Arab nation instead of its own political entity.

Similarly Article 12 states: “The Palestinian people believe in Arab unity. In order to contribute their share toward the attainment of that objective, however, they must, AT THE PRESENT STAGE OF THE STRUGGLE, safeguard their Palestinian identity and develop their consciousness of that identity, and oppose any plan that may dissolve or impair it.”

You will note that Arab unity - the maintenance of the pan-Arab Empire - is the ultimate goal. The Palestinian identity is a staging post on that journey; so it must be safeguarded “at the present stage”.  In a similar vein, we read the following in Article 14: “The destiny of the Arab nation, and indeed Arab existence itself, depends upon the destiny of the Palestine cause. ….. The people of Palestine play the role of the vanguard in the realization of this sacred (qawmi) goal.” Here again, we see that the Palestinians are at the “vanguard” of an Arab struggle for the Arab nation. They are imperial pawns.

(ii) Hamas