Painful Truths: January 2009

It's a common assumption that one finds out who one's true friends are only in times of trouble. Likewise when there is trouble in the world.

For years, one can be surrounded by people who, on the surface, may seem humane, reasonable, logical and rational but, under certain circumstances, show their true colour. I wish I could give some context to my observations in this regard but to do so may identify me and others who may not wish to be identified, so I am afraid I can't.

The Zionist slaughter in Gaza that started on 27 December 2008 and continues to this day has brought all kinds of worms out of the woodwork.

I work in a liberal, plural environment where there are people of different beliefs, nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. Most are highly educated and outwardly reasonable. As one might expect, whenever time permits we have discussions, debates and some arguments, mostly good natured.

However, the Zionist slaughter in Gaza has changed all that. First, and to my regret, some Jewish colleagues who had hitherto pretended (I am not using that word lightly) that they were liberal and enlightened have suddenly come out in the open in their true tribalistic colours, literally, explicitly and with huge venom defending the murder of women and children in Gaza and, of course, defending the fascist, racist state of Israel. Other Jewish colleagues have chosen to remain silent but silence under these murderous circumstances is tantamount to consent. Not one Jew at my work (unless they are keeping their Jewishness secret) has had the moral fibre and the courage to come out and openly criticize Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza.

Second, some non-Jewish colleagues whom I have held in neutral regard have come out like rats from the sewer to show themselves as creatures devoid of any ethics – contemptible, fascist scumbags for whom might is right. Under cover of fairness and neutrality, they defend the murder of innocent civilians as if they were defending the swatting of flies.

Why, you might ask, have these Jews and amoral gentiles chosen this time of all times to defend the indefensible, when the rest of the world, including British public opinion, are turning against Israel in revulsion at its mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza?

The answer, I think, lies in this very fact. They are coming out of the sewer to defend the murder in Gaza precisely because they feel that the tide of world opinion is turning against Israel. Like rattled serpents, they are being forced out in the open by the weight of public opinion.

This must be a good thing. As the rats come out of the sewer, the friends and apologists of Israel become exposed, thus hammering another nail in the coffin of the Zionist entity.

I don't wish to make a habit of copying whole articles on my blog but the article below by Robert Fisk, published in the Independent, is well worth making an exception for. I think Mr Fisk speaks for every Arab with a conscience and a modicum of courage.

The rotten state of Egypt is too powerless and corrupt to act

By Robert Fisk

The Independent

1 January 2009

There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" – the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut – and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – after three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals – but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.

Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why blame Mubarak?

To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border without permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us.

Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with Israel – and Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any Arab leader who took that kind of step will find that the West's economic and military support is withdrawn. Without subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it works both ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem – "I am tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow Arab leaders – he paid the price with his own blood at the Cairo reviewing-stand where one of his own soldiers called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.

The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.

There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture. A young American doctor described to me recently how in a Cairo hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic chairs to prevent access to patients. In November, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors abandoned their patients to attend prayers during Ramadan.

And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily slaughter by their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani wrote eloquently in the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the regime's "martyrs" outnumber all the dead of Egypt's wars against Israel – victims of railway accidents, ferry sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, cancers and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says, "of the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah border-crossing for wounded Palestinians – the Palestinian medical staff being pushed back into their Gaza prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids have been dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change the midden in which Egyptians themselves live.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general in Lebanon, felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their millions" to open the border with Gaza, but they will not do so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister, could only taunt the Hizbollah leaders by accusing them of trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to the one they created in their own country."

But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.

Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the Palestinians. Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering is a symbol of its own political sickness.