Crime of Selective Memory

[N.O.R.F]

Crime of Selective Memory

To assume responsibility for one's failures as well as successes is the truest sign of maturity and wisdom; also it is the only way to evolve and grow.

 

This means a nation can never grow without learning from its past mistakes, as the philosopher George Santayana said, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". However as I look at the present day Arabs I see a nation which is engulfed by chaos and beset by misery without any hope of an exit from its current tragic state. They are a people consumed by hate, self-pity and desperate lethargy. This is a lethal combination that only results in utter blindness and ignorance of their history leading to false assumptions that leave them incapable of lifting themselves from the depths to which they have sunk.

 

We started by blaming our plight on the advent of colonialism that wasn't entirely true. If the Arab nation was invaded and raped by different foreign powers the reason was both foreign greed and an innate weakness in Arab society that allowed nations like the UK, Italy, France, and finally the US to exploit it. Colonialism was to the Arabs what a virus is to an enfeebled body. We had fossilized long before colonialism arrived on our shores. Our society had ceased to evolve or grow socially, culturally and economically but somehow we found someone else to blame for everything and that too the "Turks". We blamed the Ottoman Empire for every ill that afflicted us. This doesn't mean that none of the colonialists is to blame for our suffering. Only we should admit our own share in all this.

 

Then as though all that befell us in the past wasn't enough, Israel entered the scene stealing our lands, killing and expelling the people and when we failed to retrieve our lands or get even the minutest part of justice from the world we fell into despondency and lethargy blaming once again every ill in our society on a Zionist conspiracy - be it the impoverishment of our society, the mounting illiteracy, oppressive regimes, endemic corruption, the wasted natural resources, the oppression of women and the utter wasteland which we have created from the Atlantic to the Gulf. We claimed that had it not been for Israel we wouldn't be cursed by corrupt and oppressive regimes spreading ignorance and fear in every part of the Arab world. We claim that it is the Zionist who plots in the dark fooling us into fighting each other whether in ridiculous border wars or tragic civil wars. It is "they," the enemy who wasted our wealth and forced our best and brightest to immigrate to foreign lands in search of a decent life and better education. They are the ones who made us the tragicomedy that the Arab world has come to represent in the eyes of the world.

 

Finally, "they" are to blame for the latest folly, which is the war in Iraq. I don't deny that the Zionists are our enemies and that they have committed terrible crimes and still do against the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. However, we need to admit our own responsibility for the tragic situation in which we find ourselves today.

 

Amid the terrible noise and din we made by blaming our enemies for all the catastrophes, which befell our nation, we forgot the one most important component in our misery - "ourselves". We forgot what we did and didn't do. We forgot our faults and our mistakes, our betrayals and letdowns; we forgot our history and now that history has caught up with us. Those who invaded Iraq found a weak country and a weaker region that allowed them to do what they wanted with Iraq and the rest of the Arab nation.

 

Now, when all the past excuses are no longer valid or have proven to be a deception we search frantically for anyone to blame but ourselves for the chaos into which our region has been cast. And who might this terrible new enemy be? Who is to blame for Iraq and the savage sectarian war which rages there? Who is to blame for the war in Lebanon and the political impasse that it now languishes in? Who is to blame for the starvation and planned genocide of the Palestinians? Who possibly is to blame for the Arab misery?

 

The emphatic answer of course is not the Arabs; they are always the victims of others' machinations and today's villains are none other than a wicked minority guided by the more wicked "Iranians". I would laugh if it weren't so tragic.

 

We forgot what the Arab majority have done for centuries to the minority through oppression and persecution forcing them to live on the margins of society and that is why they are today one of the poorest segments of Arab society. Have we forgotten how we watched in silence as Saddam Hussein, the false hero of the Arabs, massacred the Iraqis in the south at the end of the first Gulf War?

 

Today we find ourselves engulfed in a sectarian war in Iraq, which threatens to spill over to the entire region. The monster that Iraq has become is our creation. Have we forgotten that Saddam was the favorite child of the Arab masses in the 1980s and how he committed genocide against the Kurds while nobody said anything? The Arabs didn't consider it of any consequence that an entire race of people was being exterminated in Arab lands at the hands of Arabs. We are reaping today in Iraq the fruit of our indifference. I could go on since the list of our past mistakes is long but I don't think I would have the space in this article. So, I come to the latest Arab folly of blaming Iran for all our ills of today.

 

If anyone should fear the aggression by another in this part of the world it should be the Iranians. It was Iraq that attacked Iran in the recent past and not vice-versa or have we forgotten that too?

 

Iran hasn't attacked anyone for the past century and it was Iraq that attacked it, aided by many of the Arabs, dragging us all to a long war that only resulted in killing and maiming millions on both sides.

 

Before we head into an all-out war against an imagined enemy again and before we destroy the future of another Arab generation, I beg you to sit down and take a deep breath; then open a book of our recent history and read it and learn from it please, learn where we committed mistakes and how to fix them. Then know who your real enemy is and begin to put down an effective plan for defeating that enemy.

 

The Kurds, the Shiites, Iranians, the Africans or the Berber were never the enemy and can never be since they are us and we are them.

 

 

 

Reem Al Faisal is a photographer and writer from Saudi Arabia. She is the grand-daughter of the Saudi king Feisal. She has shown her photographic art exhibits in France, Egypt, China and Korea. She was the first artist from a Gulf state to hold an exhibit in Palestine. She is a strong activist and opponent of all forms of imperialism, including the war in Iraq.

 

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